A new mouse, and a new snare...

Right. I've had an expensive week. After my RAM turning up, I decided to replace my faulty logitech keyboard (Not the keyboard's fault, It's faulty because I broke it). I ended up going into the local computer store, and looking through the (fairly poor) range of keyboards on offer. Not content with any of them, I ended up grabbing a new mouse instead.

Stupid stupid me... Why am I always doing this? On a completely random impulse I've gone and bout the most expensive mouse in the damn store, £69.99 at their inflated prices, and I have really made myself broke.

Not to worry though, because it's a good mouse and it makes my computer slick and cool to use, which can only be a good thing. I've allowed the purchase to motivate me into doing more 3D work, this time, a replacement snare drum for my kit. I was never really happy with the one I had before, so I'm replacing it with what can only be described as the most exquisite Snare ever to grace the drum market. The Spartan, from the Tama Warlord series. Modelling it has been fun so far, I can tell you! It's a bit of a work in progress and I've still got the Snares, the strainers, and some of the ornamentation to do, as well as sorting out proper textures for the drum, and refining the tuning bolts...

Well, That's me done until something else interesting happens, have a peek at the snare as it is now, and at the sparkly mouse.

See ya!

RaWr Wars!! The Hardware fights back...

Okay. The ram arrived today, and went into my computer without any hitches at all really. Worked first time, and has taken the complete physical ram total to 3Gb. Adding virtual memory as well, this is a total of just under 10Gb which is a whopping amount of memory.

Okay so everything on my system is so much faster (or at least every memory intensive application is faster), including Max which now renders pretty quickly, without taking enough time to let me read a chapter of whatever book I have to hand...

Unfortunatley, the Max "out of memory" message pops up whenever I try to render that one particular scene, which is really odd, because I don't see how even Max could be claim to be using, trying to use, or even pretending to use, nearly TEN GIGABYTES of memory, while my iTunes, Firefox and MSN conversations remain completely untouched...

I smell a rat. But for the moment, I'm content to leave it where it is...

I'm gonna go play Xplane, and turn up AAAAAAAALLLLLLLL the settings as high as they will go.

Later!

Alarms Blaring, Lights Flashing... Argh!

Today can be summed up in twenty two little words - words that I have seen many times today, words that have caused me no end of frustration...

Yes, despite the fact that I originally spent close to a grand building a system specifically for the task of 3D rendering, I've been seeing nothing but this bloody out of memory error message all day. As soon as I click the render button, my computer grinds to a halt, the hard drive goes insane, memory and CPU usage shoot up to 100%, all other applications become unusable simply because they're so slow while the computer's trying to concentrate

So hey, I'm at some kind of impasse right now, I'm not sure where I can go from here. I'm sure as hell not going to reduce the image quality, or use less accurate/system intensive texturing, not after I've spent so long trying to make the thing as realistic as possible... so yeah, I'm stuck.

Which is akward, because the textures that I've produced for the meshes are pretty damn good quality, see for yourself at the bottom...

But yeah, I need to work around it, one way or another. I'm not putting the hours in then having my computer crying like a baby whenever anything goes wrong...

Welcome to my blog!

Okay, so, yeah welcome to my blog!

Some of you already know me, so you can skip this part. For those of you that don't, my nickname's Squid (don't ask), I'm 22, and this blog is dedicated to keeping you informed about, and showcasing, my 3D work.

I've been a 3D artist for a number of years now, and while my early stuff was really rudimentary - cubes and spheres and the like, practice does make perfect, and now I'm getting (I think!) pretty good at it.

I started out on max 4 back when I was a kid but had to stop when I got sick of the freeware restrictions. I used max 6 when I was older, and after much searching and saving, I managed (finally!) to get my hands on 3D Studio Max 8, a couple of years back. I've been working on it ever since, getting better and better, and now I figured it's time I spent more time working on my 3D stuff...

My current project is a huuuuge ten piece yamaha drumkit. Admittedly, you've joined the project mid-construction, because as you can see, I've been working on the kit for a long long time.
So where are we up to now? Well, the majority of the modelling is done so far, I've got some bits left to do, as you can probably see. Then I'm going to add some more cymbals, maybe a second snare drum, and then the whole thing needs to be textured. That lot is a whole load of work that I'm going to have to work through over the next few weeks, but hey, I enjoy it, and so far, I've had fantastic results. So while a large part of the kit is finished, the fun itself is still only just beginning!
Stay tuned, and I'll keep you good people updated about all the progress I make while working my way through this project. Hopefully, the results will be as good as I hope they're going to be! Well, I'm off to bed to get some rest for a while, then I'll be doing some 3d later tonight, until beer time, which is around 10pm. So until later, I'll leave you all be.

Talk later!