Sorry for vanishing on you for a couple of days. Life has been interesting. It was a little too fascinating for me to find the brain cells to blog too!
Here's the latest update from the "Cyberhell of Upside-down PCs dissolving in Sulphuric Acid" ... you know how the Chinese concept of multiple hells works -- hells for all occasions, right? A thousand different hells, each purpose-designed for the sinners consigned to them. At the moment I'm still in an acid-resistant boat, punting among the upside-down dissolving PCs ... but my punting pole is being eaten away, and as for this PC -- I think it was SkyNet in a previous incarnation, and is presently working out its karma.
So I've spent the last few days saving all my characters -- all but one.
Jarrat refused to be exported, or saved as anything. Nothing, and I mean nothing, would save him in the original format, which meant he had to be reconstructed in a new format that would permit saving. And above, you see the result.
This is not a render, because I can't get a render before the PC is reformatted. This is just a screencapture right off the DAZ workspace...
On the right is the reconstructed Jarrat, "live" in the new master file. On the left is the reload. You load up the Michael 4 doll, then you merge on the data file, which is a little .dsb file, and the M4 mannequin jumps into the new format. The reload is identical to the original! So (wheeze, gasp, groan) at last I found a way to get a stable, predictable, dependable load of the character -- he was "saved" off the reconstruction.
Now, he's not 100% the same. The reconstructions never are. But it's close, and I actually think the new version is better.
Here's a couple of renders of the original:
And yes, there are difference, but I think I prefer the new version. I haven't been able to get a verdict from Mel Keegan, who is the creator -- mother and father, if you will -- of Jarrat, Stone and all the other characters from NARC and Hellgate ... but it's one of those, "This is it, kiddo, take it or leave it" situations. In other words, he ain't gonna get any better!
At last -- at last! -- we're ready to reformat this %@*! &%$#! computer. Jarrat's been the reason for the delay, and here's something weird: if you know the character in the books, you'd even expect him to be the one that caused the ruckus! He's drop-dead gorgeous, absolutely one of a kind, and he'll turn your life inside out.
So cross fingers, folks. When the computer comes back up again, she'll be as-new, and here's how we're going to (try to) keep it that way: she's NOT going back online. This machine is being quarantined away from the Internet -- which means no endless rounds of Windows updates, some of which have been causing horrific instabilities, and one of which is almost certainly responsible for the crunch which happened a couple of weeks ago. This machine is going to be an art machine, totally offline. My laptop is going to be online, sitting right beside it, and I'll network the two, to make it easy to pass files back and forth, to up- and download things. Let's see how this works.
Tune in again tomorrow, and with a bit of luck I'll be able to tell you how it all went. Nothing else to do but just hit the button.
Oh, and pray a lot...!
Jade, 27 April
