Johnny Reboot Render Farm

My name is Robert J Merritt, a representative of Hollow Robot which is an Indie video game company currently developing a innovative game called Johnny Reboot. You can take a look at the website here! I am the Art Director for the game itself.
www.johnnyreboot.com

I myself have been involved in many films/commercials that are Independent or Indie based. I also have a background with Machinima.com and creating video content for them that has involved video games. You can take a look at my portfolio here.
http://www.rjmerritt.com

As a representative of the company, I am honored to say that we aspire to create artistic and truly fun games that show the hard labor and love that any game deserves. We want their to be deep meaning behind any project we take upon ourselves and to ensure it has a relatable conflict to our players. That's what Johnny Reboot is all about. Johnny Reboot, the protagonist of the game must rise and overcome his fear of entering the outside world. In this 2.5D Sidescroller, Johnny will be Leaving his comfort zone to save his loved ones and pursue his long awaited destiny to save the city of Xeno, a world within the boundaries of the internet. All while battling an internal conflict of his own known as Agoraphobia.

This game will relate to all gamers out there who struggle with this exact phobia, and even similar ones. We are spreading awareness of Agoraphobia through this game which is inspired by the games creator and Hollow Robot's Founder, Martyn Tranter and his own experiences with Agoraphobia. We intend to make Agoraphobia the surival mechanic in the game itself to try and give anyone who plays it an idea and feeling of what a character or person has to go through when suffering from severe effects from Agoraphobia. 

Currently we are developing a Prototype for the game and a CGI Cinematic to show how serious we are. The Cinematic itself is aiming to be very high quality. We managed to scrounge up enough money to purchase a license for a Render Engine known as Redshift, which will be playing a key part in making this cinematic look breath taking. We will be using the Prototype and Cinematic to pitch the game to investors, as well as launching a Kickstarter Campaign to get the game funded.

Since we are a brand-new Indie company, our finances are severely limited and even creating a Cinematic can be pricey. That is why we are asking for your help to make this a reality! We need your help to get a renderfarm to render our cinematic for our game's Pitch to investors and Kickstarter! Currently we have many artists working on the Cinematic who are creating 3D Models of Buildings, Characters and Props. Here are some Work In Progress Images!

We employed a Concept Artist to create this concept art of the city of Xeno. We are currently recreating this concept art in 3D, and we will be making a Cinematic Video out of it to go along with our game's Prototype to show how cinematic and story driven our game will be.


Firstly we started sketching out the layout of the city.

Then we put together a small and very basic representation of the 3D Scene to get an idea of where everything wille be placed relatively.

Then we started on making the 3D Assets for the scene, detailing them as much as possible. Everything is still work in progress, but when it is done, it will be very high quality!

You can check out more of the stuff we have at
http://www.johnnyreboot.com

What We Need?

So this will take us a few months to create and animate. But once we have all of that done, the next big struggle is rendering the animation. Currently we only have ONE computer to render it. The problem is that the animation will be precisely 2 minutes and 55 seconds. I have estimated that each frame will take at least 20 - 30 minutes to render. We are going to have this Animation play at 24 frames per second. So lets do some math and figure out how long it will take us to render everything with the ONE computer we have.

24 (FRAMES PER SECOND) X 145 SECONDS (Duration of the Animation) = 3, 480 Frames we have to render.

So if each frame takes 30 minutes to render, and we have to render 3,480 frames, the amount of time it will take is big! But let me show you the math.

First we need to figure out how many seconds are in 30 minutes! So all you do is multiply 60 seconds by 30 minutes. That gets you 1,800 seconds in 30 minutes.

Now... if each frame takes 1,800 seconds to render, all we have to do is multiply 1,800 seconds by 3,480 Frames.

1,800 (Seconds) X 3,480 (Frames) = 6, 264,000 Seconds

So let me repeat this... with ONE computer, it will take us SIX MILLION TWO HUNDRED AND SIXTY FOUR THOUSAND seconds to render this animation, which is precisely 72.5 days of rendering.

So with the money from the GoFundMe, there is a lot we need to get. But since Redshift is a GPU based Render Engine, we are able to get much faster Render Times with less hardware! If we utilized V-Ray instead of Redshift we would be looking at 2 - 3 HOURS PER FRAME, which means we would have to buy MORE HARDWARE for more PC power. 

So all we need is one PC Tower, 4 NVIDIA GPU'S, 64 Gigabytes of Memory, Intel i7 Processor, Water Cooler, Power supply and 2 Terabytes of Storage. Having this much storage will be perfect for future 3D Renders as well, as Image Sequences can be very very large in file size!

Here is an image of the final price of all of these things!

We need 5,494.70 to get the hardware to render this in a much faster time frame!We would be able to assign 1 frame per GPU with this computer, so it would take us 30 minutes to render 4 frames simultaniously. To calculate how much faster it will take to Render the whole animation with the new pc, all we have to do is take the final render duration and divide it by 4.

6, 264,000 Seconds (1 Frame Render) % 4 (Four Extra Frames) = 1,566,000 Seconds

ONE MILLION FIVE HUNDRED AND SIXTY SIX THOUSAND seconds, which is only 18 DAYS of rendering!

That is a big difference this computer will make, and it will help us meet our deadline much faster for pitching this game. 

So why do we need 10,000?

1: Well the computer itself will be 5,494.70 as according to the list above, but we also need to take into account shipping.

2:  Many of these prices may go off-sale by the time we buy all of these things, so having wiggle room is good so we will have a sufficient amount.

3:  GoFundMe takes 7.9% + 30 Cents per donation. Which will end up being around 700 - 800 dollars deducted from the final amount. This is impossible to calculate unfortunately because it all depends on how much each backer donates. But that is a rough number.

4: We need to purchase another Redshift License from the RedShift Company which is an additional 500 dollars. We currently own one, but in order for us to work and render simultaniously, we need a license for the new computer as well.

5: If there is anything left, we will put all of that toward the new computer for perhaps additional hard drive space or even more software. We will let you guys know if so! :)

We are looking to have the funds raised by the Middle of February. Mainly because we plan to wrap up Production on the cinematic animation by then. Possibly even longer due to the Holidays. But then after Production we begin rendering. 

Thank You So So So MUCH!

If you have read this far, we at Hollow Robot sincerely thank you for your interest! It really means a lot. The biggest gift to us is your willing to help. We WANT to make this game, and our gift to you is our vow to give you truly profound and meaningful games such as Johnny Reboot. It is our intent to break into the industry and to make a difference in the innovation of games. 

If you are even more interested in Johnny Reboot, feel free to check out our websites! You can find means to contact us through there as well.
http://www.johnnyreboot.com
http://www.hollowrobot.com