I did more things in Blender. (surprise!) So I actually worked on a few projects this week. Just kind of jumped around because I really didn’t want to deal with hard shit this week. The last few weeks have been such a pissoff that I lost a lot of motivation to continue using Blender. But I did some things. Nothing really too crazy.

List of things I did this week.

Tried to make a spaceship like 10 fucking times

Took my good ship and put it in my good environment

Made a Happy Birthday animation for Rick lol

Took a particle scene and made it wayyy better and animated it.

Fixed RenderStation™ ?

Ill tackle these in the order listed above.

\Tried to make a spaceship like 10 fucking times. I had this idea for a spaceship for a while. I had basic ass sketches as I am NOT an artist. Which now that I think about it, is probably why I can’t model a spaceship. BUT I tried. I tried using so many methods, build it up with parts, work with one mesh, proper topology, errthang. Nothing was working. I made a nosepiece that I’ll probably show next week because I don’t have a render of it. Artistically challenged is a good word for what I am. I can take pictures, I can take video, but its kinda like cheating. You take the things around you and CLICK now its somehow yours. Plenty of challenge in its own right, but its nothing in comparison to having to MAKE the content. I can’t visualize the shape as I make it and trying to model off a reference image is not working out for me. I would like to use curves, but they baffle me and I have an entire write up bitching about how much they suck balls. So none of that on a cooldown week haha.

\Took my good ship and put it in my good environment. So I can’t make a new ship, but I did make one a while back that was ok so I kinda added some things that I’ve needed to do on it for a while and stuck it in a scene. Another project I did a few months ago was a warehouse. So I opened that up and stuck the ships inside. I also had some unfinished detail work to complete so I got to work on that. Cleaned it up and started working on lighting and stuff. Got that all figured out and hit render. I wish there was more to this but really it was pretty basic. I just wanted to see a “finished” product. I mean It’s never really finished when you have the file on hand but it was more to help my morale. I think it looks cool. I was up to 2 in the morning on a work night tweaking it. It does need more work but it’s really starting to get there.

\Made a Happy Birthday animation for Rick lol This one was kind of fun. It took little time to model and this was my goal because the more complicated it gets, the longer it takes to render and I really wanted an animation out of it so I went to work. Every time I start a new project, I have a basic idea of how I am going to execute the details. This one I know I wanted particles (confetti) and text and some poppers. I put the particle emitter in the poppers and made a few short flat strips to be the confetti and gave them confetti like colors then made them shiny. This worked out in every way I had envisioned it. That's a change, but like I said, it's a simple scene so there wasn’t too much to fuck up.

\Took a particle scene and made it wayy better and animated it. A few weeks ago I got to making some more particle scenes and ended up saving one. I went back to see what I could do to make it better. I figured I’m all hot and bothered over shiny balls and ring lights, so why not make that and animate it! So that I did. The particle engine was just some basic rotational forces on some newtonian particles that move up from the bottom of the scene to the top. I added my ring lights in, set up the DOF, hit render and went to bed. About 2 days later, the animation was done! BUTTT I missed focus and it was on the wrong ring so they were in focus on spawn but out of focus near the camera where I wanted it. After that I decided that I didn’t want to animate it yet because fuck those render times. I was now about to turn on all of the goodies! I played with the settings for hours and hours and got a pretty slick looking render out of it so I kept changing it and rendering it.

\Fixed RenderStation™ ? After last week trying to fix the computer I just put it off to the side and figured I would hit up ASRock Rack support but I wasn’t quite convinced that I had tried everything so I hooked it back up and started troubleshooting again. I also wanted to build up a list of things I tried when the support team inevitability asks what I had tried. So I tried more ram configurations I tried all of the BIOS settings and still nothing. The only thing I don’t recall fucking with was the video card. I know it worked because it’s been working in other computers for the last 3 years without a hitch. Here’s the deal. With Xeons, you get 40 PCIE lanes per CPU so when you have 2 of them, you get 80 PCIE lanes, follow? So this means that you can put any hardware in any slot and have it operate at full speed. Pretty bad ass. So I had ASSUMED that the video card could go anywhere I liked. The computer bitched when I put it in the top slot per computer building standards so I had settled on a mid slot. This is NOT the slot for a video card, in fact, it’s one of the only ones not recommended for a video card. So I moved it down into a recommended slot and it hasn’t crashed in 3 days and I have HAMMERED it. Usually, but not always, I could get it to crash if I opened about 20 youtube videos in chrome but it was hit or miss. Well I have done EVERYTHING and it hasn’t crashed, 40 youtubes playing at once, playing WoW while an active CPU render was going on in the backround (thats just straight up impressive) and still rock solid. I have not put the rest of the ram back in yet but I’m pretty sure I had it crash in the current configuration so I should be fine. I’m still super scared to even shut it down because it got to a point last week where I couldn’t even get it to boot. Im working with only (only I know) 32gb ram but I need to get the other 96gb back in there to really test it out.

Wish me luck!!

This weeks media

https://drive.google.com/folderview?id=0B5gRarvHyXZScmZkVUxxWjRGSEk&usp=sharing

Last Edited on Thu Aug 11 2016 00:07:21 GMT-0400 (EDT)