technonaturalist

When I’m not finding UV mapping agonisingly quirky, I’m being frustrated by Blender’s borderline unusable viewport lagginess at 2.2M polys. There is some progress being made. UV mapping was interesting as I couldn’t figure out how to project onto part of a mesh like I’ve done previously in Lightwave so I ended up mapping the entire object om question. For the shirt I just painted the whole thing and ued minimal nodes for colour and bump maps. For the tattoos and face markings I stuffed around a hell of a lot with the skin shader and eventually got them on there but it now means I have blue freckles instead of dark brown.

Photos from the last couple of weeks. After 10yo had sent off an enquiry email to WAFFS, they put is in contact with a lovely lady in the area who let us play with her ferrets and answered all the questions we had and then said we should head up to the AGM the following day if we didn’t have any plans as people brought their ferrets to these things. We didn’t have anything on that morning (unfortunately parents in law were off travelling so we couldn’t visit them while we were in the area) so we trotted along to go have a look.

My iMac is about three years old. It’s kicking along fine, as long as I don’t do anything too hardcore in the 3d department. We’re having slight issues there, as in Blender starts lagging and acting strangely (like failing to realise that I’ve “released” when the pen is off the tablet) when it has to deal with over 2M polys.

This is the machine I want to get:

Mac Pro

• 2.7GHz 12-core with 30MB of L3 cache
• 64GB (4 x 16GB) of 1866MHz DDR3 ECC
• 256GB PCIe-based flash storage
• 2x AMD FirePro D700 GPUs with 6GB of GDDR5 VRAM
• Apple Thunderbolt Display (27-inch)
• 3 year warranty

Unfortunately I don’t have $14 197 kicking around (and if I did I wouldn’t after I’d dropped it onto the mortgage). It goes down to $12 097 if I go down to the 3.0GHz 8-core with 25MB of L3 cache and $9 997 if I settle for the 3.5GHz 6-core with 12MB of L3 cache. Additionally I’d have to get some extra drives for storage because I opted for the smaller built in drive with the intention of expanding externally. Ideally I’d like one of the Pegasus RAIDS that you can get bundled with it but unfortunately I’m not yet a proper studio with a budget for these things (as is I’m lucky to be in a position where I can start scraping together money for the next machine as soon as I’ve bought one as it takes about that long to save up, but sometimes other things like unexpectedly large vet bills or planning on buying another house and moving into it can interfere with that).

6yo: Daddy you’re from Satan!
JJ (laughing): How’d you work that one out?
6yo: Coz you’re a DEMON!

This work by ryivhnn is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License

Me (reading Dr Seuss’ Sleep Book to 6yo): On a mountain halfway between Reno and Rome, we have a machine in a plexiglass dome which listens and looks into everyone’s home…
10yo (interrupting): That’s…really creepy.

Yep.

This work by ryivhnn is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License

Me (to 6yo who fell asleep in the car): You’re a knackered tacker aren’t you.
10yo: As am I.
Me: Go jump in the shower then so you can rest up after.
10yo: I do not think the occasional cleansing is necessary at this point.

This work by ryivhnn is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License

[At Aunty’s house]

8yo: I was a Freo supporter when I was in Mum’s belly! I was a Freo supporter before humans came to Earth!
me: Before humans came to Earth? Did they come in a spaceship?
8yo: Mum, Mum, Mum, Mum, Mum [exasperated sigh] they were born from coconuts!

[in car about to leave Aunty’s house]

me [readjusting car controls]: Jeez [JJ] you drive like you have a carrot up your arse.
8yo: Yeah Daddy don’t drive a carrot up your arse.

I had spent a decent amount of time regaling 10yo with hilarious episodes of my 3d experimentations revolving around the shenanigans that can happen when one doesn’t parent controllers properly or grabs bones instead of controllers by accident and stuff like that. Then to prove that parents don’t know everything I showed him that I was researching some way to use a complete dynatopo sculpt rather than finishing off the multires one I was working on. While talking to him I started fixing up some errors I hadn’t noticed in the dynatopo sculpt at the time and zoomed out a bit too far, causing a brush stroke to remove too much detail over the bit I brushed over. I cried out “OH CRAP” and promptly hit the undo combo. 10yo came scurrying into the room crying “WAIT I WANT TO SEE YOUR HORRENDOUS MISTAKE!”

The City of Gosnells recently had its Homegrown Festival, but due to many clashes of things the only thing we ended up making was the Liddelow Homestead Open Day. It has a really cool corridor.

There was also a stove which the kids didn’t initially recognise as such, we spent a few minutes talking about what it might be before I told them what it was, and we then discussed how one might control the temperature of the stove when cooking.

Seems the house gets populated by more coporeal people as I get older.

Last time I recall being there when there were people there, there was some kind of masquerade ball going on. This time there was just people going about their daily business, and one of the rooms I’d been too scared to enter previously just felt a bit creepy this time round, which has been happening with more and more of the rooms in the middle section. The “open bathroom” (an alcove which has bathroom stuff in it but no outer walls) is still there and as far as I can tell still doesn’t get used. I had to take the kids “home” (thought towards the beginning I was living in the house as I do sometimes but not this time apparently), the kids and I were getting ready to leave out the front door, 8yo initially didn’t want to leave but then remembered she hadn’t had dinner.