August 9, 2018

I’ve loved the electric sheep project, in theory and result, for over a decade now.

However as time has worn on those old renders, even the 1080p ones, are starting to show their age. Since AMD is selling processors like they’ve got something to prove again, I decided to burn some time and silicon into rendering a 4k no-holds-barred high quality electric sheep render.

Building on the excellent curated flock and script utilities by Simon I rendered about 2 hours of video at 4k of the same flock of sheep. It took about 6 months on an overclocked Ryzen 1700 system stuffed under my couch. The encoding took a fair bit of time too. As the result is tens of gigs and I’m not sure how many people will want to download it (a lot, I expect!) I’m hosting it as a torrent.

So I give you, oh internet, Electric Sheep in 4k.

magnet:?xt=urn:btih:967f9b9bbed78bb7ed1171a18fa3d1f56c325dd0&dn=4ksheep_264_2pass_crf24_speed1_bv45M.mp4

EDIT: I’ve heard through a few channels of various seeding issues etc. I’ve got my seedbox going again so the video should be available.

In case you have other questions or comments about the video, you can contact me via 4kelectricsheep at gmail. I’ll check it occasionally.

Here’s a frame from one of the first sheep to give you an idea. Click for full res.

Fair warning, if you don’t have dedicated h.264 playback hardware this will likely not play smoothly. I’ve had good success plugging an SSD into modern 4k tvs and playing off the disk, as well as on more modern graphics cards/cpus with support.

Enjoy!

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