I’m a big fan of the Electric Sheep project by Scott Draves, and after buying a nice, new 1080p telly I decided I’d like to display it in full HD to mesmerise guests when I’m not watching anything.
The following is a 2-hour looping video of the 256 most-voted sheep on the sheep server rendered in Full HD.
More details and a torrent for a high quality mkv version or burnable blu-ray iso below.
You’ll want to watch this full screen, in 1080p. Ideally whilst playing some music.
Electric Sheep in HD is an high-definition rendering from the Electric Sheep project by Scott Draves. You can find more about it at http://electricsheep.org/ Scott’s website is at http://scottdraves.com/For a high-quality download, use one of the following torrents:
- H264 MKV (17 GB) (magnet)
- Blu-ray ISO (22 GB) (magnet)
This work is released under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial license, which means that you can do what you want with it provided it’s for non-commercial use and that you attribute the original authors.
For more information on re-using content from the Electric Sheep project, see http://electricsheep.org/reuse
‘Sheep’ are fractal animations that can be designed by humans, generated by computers using a genetic algorithm, or a combination of both. This animation used the top 256 ‘best’ sheep (by number of votes) from the Electric Sheep server, rendered into a looping animation. It should show as a continuous loop, provided your player supports it.
Several sheep used in this animation were provided by the following users:
- brood
- BrothaLewis
- Cirno-chan
- coppercat
- cqfd93
- drunkenbutterfly
- freakiebeat
- harmsc12
- Jack
- kward1979uk
- llamamama
- mitey
- perisarc
- phoenix0
- Phssthpok
- sajrty
- Randomized0000
- Randomizer
- ReFa
- Ursitti
Here is a complete list of the sheep used in the animation.
The project was rendered in HD by Simon Detheridge, using Flam3 by Scott Draves and Ffmpeg, and a bunch of Ruby scripts to organise the rendering.
Rendering took over 2 weeks, primarily on an heavily-overclocked 6-core Intel i7 computer, with a number of other computers drafted in to help at various times. Each sheep is rendered as a 180-frame loop looped 3 times, followed by a 180-frame transition into the next sheep.
The resulting video was encoded to mkv H264 Level 4.1 High Profile, using ffmpeg and the x264 codec, with a quality setting of crf 24.0 and also a blu-ray ISO containing a looping video.
No audio is contained in the file. However, the music of Ott goes quite well :-)
72 Responses to “Electric Sheep in HD”
This looks terrific. Thanks so much for posting it.
The video is fantastic! But I can’t get any seeds on the torrents…
There are plenty of seeds on the torrents. I’m seeding with my own connection, plus one server in the USA and another server in the UK. No firewalls.. I’d check your own settings.
Thank you for sharing. This is just cpu rendered? Have you looked into cuda rendering using flam4? I am in the process of doing a similar project with the top sheep, except rendering each frame at a much higher quality setting. Did you do any modification to the flam3 files (scale, quality, interpolation, passes)?
Yes, entirely CPU using flam3 rather than flam4/CUDA. Flam4 is not yet ready for this kind of stuff…. See this chat I had on Reddit: http://www.reddit.com/r/fractals/comments/zta4n/2hour_1080p_electric_sheep_animation_oc/c68043j
… regarding the differences between flam3 and flam4. Specifically, flam4 is very crashy and does not handle the motion settings in the same way that flam3 does. I don’t think you’ll get higher quality settings than the ones I rendered at, unless you’re going for a ~4K resolution instead of 1080p. All the flam3 files were interpolated by flam3-genome, plus a template that specified the 1920×1080 reolution, plus temporal_samples=200 (which flam4 does not appear to understand.) IMHO, flam4 is not yet ready for doing very high quality rendering of sheep from the Sheep server yet.
I did muck about with a template file, but beyond that all this was generated from a bunch of files generated via the top 256 sheep processed by flam3-genome, plus a load of frames rendered by flam3-anim (and some scripts kicking off the latter on various different computers)
It did take 3 weeks to render and transcode from raw PNG files, rather than a few days that flam4 would have taken, but the quality wouldn’t have been as good.
If you are interested, I’ve made a GPU renderer for nVidia cards that is extremely fast, stable and supports the motion blurring of flam3. It is technically not exactly the same since it does not lock the histogram when accumulating, but it shouldn’t change the output images much, especially when animating. Everything else is the same.
Also, as an added bonus, the console programs accept command line arguments in addition to environment variables.
code.google.com/p/fractorium
Give it a look!
Thanks, I was looking for something like this when I did the initial render, but nothing had the quality of the CPU renderer at the time.
Cool man. Great project. So, do you have your own archive of sheep then? If so, how far back does it go?
Not really. I’ve had ES installed as a screen saver for many years, but I’ve not really played with rendering them until just recently. I really just wanted to have something to play on my new TV.
I meant the video clips, not ones you’ve designed. Do you keep all of them?
This is amazing! I’m currently trying to torrent the file though but haven’t been able to start downoading it. Do you know if people are still seeding this?
Yeah, it’s permanently seeded from my web server, so there will always be at least one high bandwidth seed.
nevermind, it finally started downloading! Thanks so much for making and sharing this!
For some reason when i play the file it turns all pixely and lags out. not the entire time, but probably a little less than half the time. what do you think is the reason? i went to the matroska website and downloaded the media player classic. not sure if thats the wrong one, im not the best with computers
I’m not sure, but have you tried playing with VLC player? That’s normally the easiest and best for playing this kind of file.
It could also be computer performance? It takes quite a lot of CPU power to play the video and if you’re running on a slower machine that might cause an issue. The blu-ray takes less CPU power to display, but is a larger download.
the VLC player is much better, thanks a bunch. but i think youre right, it feels like the computer is barely keeping up with it. i was under the impression that the blu-ray ISO was only playable if you burned it onto a disc though. so how does that work? the larger file doesnt bother me too much.
You’re a god.
Hey great links, fast download too!
Thank you very much !! I have electric sheep screen saver for long years and i love it.
Happy to have this in 1080p ;)
Brilliant, thank you for posting this. I’ve been looking everywhere for high resolution electric sheep videos. It would be great if Draves (or anyone else) modified the screensaver front/backend to display high res sheep. It’s 2012 now and our computers and displays are begging for it.
Amazing!
Wow and you didn’t even charge 10,000$$$!!!!
You’re my new hero. I’ve been wanting to find or render HD sheep for years. Can’t wait for this torrent to finish.
Downloaded and now seeding. Thanks for the work and specially for sharing it with the community.
I agree with Alex. The electric sheep screensaver backend should be modified to render sheeps in higher resolution. I think there is already enough computing power for that.
Long time our clients are rendering flames to HD but only for the HD project of Draves, for selling mised sheeps like this.
On our side only receive SD sheeps. Sad but true.
For what is known, its their call on this, Draves and the sheep designers listed above, discussed long time ago on the genetic list.
Just for the note, some of the sheep genetic designers are my heroes.
Simon, you also my hero for doing this amazing collection.
Thank you.
It’s possible to you to explain how you rendered the “sheeps”? (I.E., step by step).
I’m interested in rendering some sheeps that I like into high quality videos, but I don’t know how.
Also, thank you for your nice work.
I can’t really give you a guide, as I wrote a bunch of scripts to do a lot of the work and it’s not straightforward. To get started, you’ll need to use the flam3 tool, and the wiki page on animating flames is a good starting point.
Even if not straightforward, could you upload your scripts to say, github so others could reproduce your work?
As long as you give the good ole “No support, as is” disclaimer, it would be very useful to me.
Well Kyle, it seems you did it yourself : https://github.com/solarkennedy/electricsheep-hd
I concur w/ Kyle Anderson. A github where we could download the scripts used would be very beneficial to me as well.
I’m not interested in the sheep creation process, or designing new sheep. I am interested in rendering them at high res and learning the process involved.
I have several servers I could use as a rendering farm and this would be a great project to apply to them.
21.9gb? thats only a little bit extremely fucking massive D:
Just watch it on YouTube if you’re not fussed about the quality. :-)
Thanks so much Simon. I’ve downloaded the blu-ray ISO. Now how do I play it? I open it with VLC but nothing happens. What do I need to play it? Thanks.
You need to burn it to a blu ray and play it in a player or mount it as a virtual drive and use ‘open disc’ in vlc. The mkv is more designed for playing on a pc though.
I was able to get the blu-ray to play by mounting it to a virtual drive. Too much hassle every time I want to play, so I’m going to get the MKV. I noticed the file size is about 5GB smaller. Does that mean it’s more compressed, and therefore lower quality? I’d like to know. Thanks.
It’s actually slightly better quality. It benefits from some extra compression settings that blu ray players can’t handle. The downside is that it needs a more powerful cpu to decode it. Most modern pcs can handle it just fine though.
Thanks for the info, downloading now!
So I downloaded it and it looks great. However, I am seeing some pretty noticeable jaggies. I am curious what value you used for oversample? I find that no oversample (1) definitely produces jaggies. However, just setting it to 2 greatly reduces them. What did you use?
Thank you Thank you Thank you Thank you Thank you Thank you Thank you Thank you
Hi there, just thought I’d say thanks. Saw it on youtube and definitely NEED the bluray ISO. It seems I am downloading through 2 servers, brilliant torrent!
How do you actually use this with the Electric Sheep program, so it can be used as the screensaver? Thanks, any help would be much appreciated!
You can’t I’m afraid. The screen saver renders each sheep individually, and many transitions between them. It would be prohibitive on both disk space and render time to do that in 1080p.
this is amazing … thanks for putting this up and sharing with us … peace & love
So is it possible to make render and share (or keep) personal electric sheep in 1080p HD or higher resolution? How long would a single let’s say 10 second HD sheep take to render?
Depends on the sheep. Anywhere from 10 minutes to an hour or more… The problem is the transitions. There are hundreds of transitions between the sheep, without which the whole thing looks very jarring. They’d take up a massive amount of space.
Any chance someone could convert this into a PS3 or PS4 compatible version. It took 11 hours to download this 16.8gb beast, then another half hour to split into 3 parts and convert to m2ts, then another half hour burning onto 3 8.4gb dvds only to find that he PS3 doesnt play them…. just a black screen.
These are amazing and i’d love i9t if they were easy to just load up on the ps3.
Why not just download and burn the bluray iso? I think the PS3 plays bluray…
I havent got a bluray burner, i doubt im not the only person not to have one….
Email me your mailing address and I’ll send you a bluray. simon at highlyillogical.org ;-)
Hi Simon that would be fantastic if you could post a copy to me, do you have an email address that i can send my address to?
Thanks a lot
Billy
[email protected]
Thank you Simon, ive just emailed you.
Hi Simon, did you get my email from the other week with my address in it?
Billy
Hey, sorry. I burned the disc but forgot to mail it out. I’ll do it today.
I’ve deleted your other comment. If you want a random stranger on the internet to do something nice for you (I’m not obliged to burn you a free blu-ray disc and mail it to you at my cost) then throwing insults around probably isn’t the best way to go about doing it.
Apologies, sarcasm doesn’t carry well over the internet.
Hi simon im sorry if I came across as an ungreatful asshole, your bluray has just arrived. Thankyou very much. To show my appreciation and support ive just purchased electric sheep on the android market, hopefully you see some of the proceeds from all the sales. Thanks again.
Have you thought about making a 60fps version? Anyway it’s very nice.
I really wish you would post the BluRay image on a regular http download service like HugeFiles or Putlocker, or 180upload. Some of us don’t do torrents. Even an FTP site would be okay.
Unfortunately, none of the services you mentioned allow a file over 10Gb. In fact, I’ve looked around and I can’t find anywhere that allows files of this size without having to pay quite a lot. If you know of any, please gget in touch… Thanks.
I’m sure archive.org should allow bigger files than that. They already had the ten gig limit in 2011 and time passed since then. https://archive.org/post/379280/file-size-limit
Also let’s see how they respond to a quick Twitter request https://twitter.com/almereyda/status/548584047807844352 .
If you can hook up the video work with some kind of research, it would also be eligible for http://zenodo.org/ hosting – and they easily handle even larger files.
You can use MEGA, which should definitely be capable of handling this file size :-)
https://mega.co.nz/#info
Thank You,for this trippin” video
I bought a bluray burner JUST so I could download this amazing video to play on my PS3. I’m a complete noob when it comes to torrents. I downloaded FreeTorrentViewer, downloaded the bluray torrent you linked above and now I’m stuck. I can’t seem to do anything with the file now. I can’t find a way to save it into a file so I can then rip it onto disc. (I’m guessing that’s how you do it…like you would an audio file?) I can’t even play it back with the Viewer. It just starts seeding when I try to play it. Any help or suggestions would be most welcome.
Awesome stuff, is the torrent updated to the 3 hr version 2.0? The comments section of that version on Youtube is what directed to me to this site for the torrent download, but all the info seems to be about version 1.0.
Just cannot stop watching this. Downloaded the MKV and I now have no need for iTunes/PS3 Visualiser.
Next step would be to have the processing power of a small country to make these sheep sync to audio.
: )
Thank you to all that were involved in creating this.
> Next step would be to have the processing power of a small country to make these sheep sync to audio.
: )
Yeah, I was thinking about that, too! Let’s wait for personal quantum computers …
Hi to every one, the contents present at this site are in fact remarkable for people
experience, well, keep up the good work fellows.
This is so well polished ! Do a 4k version of it, please ! :)
I know this is an ancient post, but I’m trying to download the torrents with no success. Are the torrents still being hosted? Thanks!
I seed the mkv from a 100Mbit upload fiber connection if you still want it.
You’re so cool! I don’t think I have read something like that before.
So wonderful to find somebody with a few unique thoughts on
this subject matter. Seriously.. thanks for starting this up.
This web site is one thing that’s needed on
the web, someone with some originality!