YOU can’t change someone else. This is actually fact. You can do nothing to change the mind of another person. They have to do it themselves, all on their own. Furthermore, if they don’t want to change, they won’t even do it themselves.

That’s where I was for what has now been literally over a year. Week after week, people telling me “Zach, you need to texture” and I didn’t give a fuck. My mindset was that texturing is the devil's work and only satan and his minions can pull it off. I would have to sell my eternal soul to merely obtain the will to texture. Either I have eternal suffering after death, OR something clicked and now I just have the drive to texture things now...not sure which yet. Ill let you know when I die.

List of things I did this week

1. Had one of the more stressful weeks of work in my career.

2. Fixed RenderStation™

3. Found a place to download some free cycles textures.

4. Textured the shit out of everything I have.

So..In order of shit I did.

1. This week was fucking crazy at work. I’ve never been pulled in so many directions at one time. I had people jumping down my throat to get things done without warning. I had a backlog of work from the 3 weeks I played the role of lead technician AND my job while he was out for an unexpected 3 week. Not that any of this matters, but I had to put in over 20 hours of work from home this week after work to get shit done and that seriously cuts into my time.

2. Fixed Renderstation. So I spent A LOT of my time working on RenderStation™. I did some looking into specific information about my board and the particular problem I was having. I found 6 people that had the same NMI hardware failure and totally random lockups. It was VERY relieving to see some say, “I thought I was loosing my mind because it would be stable for days then you open a youtube video and BOOM crash.” I’ve never gone through such a thorough troubleshooting process on a computer until this one. Ever stick of ram, every slot, every PCIE slot, every SATA port. EVERYTHING got moved, reseated, or something. I also heard that there was a PCIE issue with newer cards with the move from gen2 PCIE to gen3 PCIE. This was about the time the 600series came out which are….all of my extra cards…………..I didn’t want to put the 980ti in there so I just reduced the PCIE to gen2 and left it at that. I got lucky that people ran Win7 on these boards before win10 came out because people complaining that it ran fine in win7 but ate shit on win10. I seriously can’t describe how amazing it was to read this because that means it was mostly software. The video card issue wasn’t an issue unless you run gen3 which I don’t need for that card anyway. So installed windows 7 about 3x times because fuck windows updates and its been working like a charm. Fuck me…..at least it’s actually done and working. Phew. Did NOT want to buy a new mobo lol.

3. Found a place to download textures. So I was going to start Blendering this week with making my own textures and doing the displacement map, specular, diffuse, and normal all myself. This isn’t reasonable. I don’t know how to tile textures, I don’t quite fully grasp the node set up for all of these and last and I don’t have a great program any more to make these maps after my trial ran out of CrazyBump (still trying to figure out a way to reset the demo timer). I would have to photoshop all of them and look up how to get the values out of the image. Too much time. I just need to play with some textures and see how they look in a scene. If I get used to working with them, when it comes time to make my own, maybe I won’t be so overwhelmed by the entire process. The parts I worked with the textures were,

   1. UV unwrapping
   2. Placing the pieces on the part of the texture I want.
   3. Texture value editing, like brightness, contrast ect.
   4. Various map strengths and color.

This is about half the process for texturing. The other half is getting the actual texture, making a node for it and creating the maps. At this point if you give me a material, I can get it on pretty much anything now which is a HUGE stepping stone for me. I feel comfortable enough working in this space to maybe try creating my own textures this week. I might spend another week just playing with the textures I downloaded but at some point I will need to do my own. I remember my wacom baboo being super useful back in the day. So I bought a new Wacom drawing tablet for photoshop and texturing so hopefully now that I have the tools, it should get easier.

1. I textured the shit out of everything. I opened like every cool scene I had and applied textures to it. Projects I haven’t touched in a year BOOM...now have textures lol. I didn’t save most of them because it my first tries at UVunwrapping sucked dick. After I got the hang of it, I figured I would try to get some real textures in the scene I’ve been working on for a few weeks. Spaceship hangar. It’s a great test platform because all of the meshes are fully clean and workable including the ship. This has been due to my new efforts at scene organization and management. This alone has made a world of difference in workability and longevity of the scene. Many of my other projects are “broken” and can’t be reasoned with because of some setting in the backround fucking up my day and I can’t find it. I made some changes to the scene before starting to texture. I made more armor plating to cover the FUCKING JET ENGINE I PUT IN THERE! HA. I was so excited. I have so many little models and stuff that I can start using them to make my existing scenes better. The jet engine is just for detail so I put it sticking out the back half for effect and I kept the lighting from the project in there too. This week is where the scene is really taking off. I textured the metal I beams, the armor plating on the ship and the ship itself. I also got the floor looking good even with a relative low res texture 2048x2048 is actually not that bad but it's a fairly big scene so I had to do some tricks. DOF really helped me out here so you can’t see where I tiled it. I also textured the drop cloth on the back ship and now it has proper translucency which it REALLY need to look real and it has a kinda burlap texture over it now. I rendered in 4k so if you zoom in a little, you can see that there is texture. I tried not to DOF it out all the way. I switched from world volumetrics to local volumetrics for better control over lighting and outside appearance. Unexpected changes in the material caused a few blow out on my first render but I fixed all that in the second and I was able to push the edit much further. Ill post the final in renders today. Maybe if I get better at texturing, I can get better at making an image. I spend so much of my time working with the tool that my framing and lighting often suffers. It’s like getting a new camera. You have no clue how to use it and for some reason your pro photo taking abilities go right out the window and you’re a noob again taking pictures of tree tops and soda cans.

TLDR: Im super happy with my progress this week. Textured so much shit and I’m starting to get the hang of it.

Last Edited on Tue Aug 30 2016 21:36:53 GMT-0400 (EDT)