Serendipity, Hellgate and the Blue Screen of Death

After a lot of fantasy in the last week I thought, let's do some science fiction. I also wanted to play around with a couple of new props that I got recently -- that hairstyle (Mullet, by Neftis) and that set of jeans and shirt, Cold Life. All elements just came together in the one project, and I was rendering the first one (it's the Section 15 set in the background -- a great SF prop, from DAZ) when I thought, "Just a second, this reminds me of someone." So I bounced the renders off Mel Keegan who said, "You're dead right." So you can put a tick beside another of the Hellgate characters -- one of the secondary players, but one of my favorites.The Wastrel's Weimann Drive specialist, Tully.

These renders are not raytraced ... so much this PC will do, and no more. I'm starting to see the Blue Screen Of Death, which usually tells you to get ready to install a whole new system inside the next few months. You're supposed to be able to cure the problem by installing new drivers and getting rid of recently acquired software which has stuffed everything up, but the only new thing I've installed lately is (!) Internet Explorer 9, from Microsquashed itself! Uh ... Microsquashed just sabotaged itself??!

So the next thing we're trying is a roll-back ...revert the system to where it was 10 days ago, on the system restore points. the PC is working, but it's gone from being a greyhound to being a dachshund, waddling along on little short legs! (And before anyone says anything, I like dachshunds, and corgis -- they're dead cute. You just don't enter them in high-speed events.)

I'll let you know if the system restore works; and if I have to get a new system - well, I guess I'll blog about that, too!

Anyway, at the moment things are a bit fraught, mechanically, but I'm working on prepping Hellgate for publication, and (which might be good news for some of you guys) we're also preparing the NARC series to go to Kindle. It's a big project, which is why it's taking time, but we're getting there.

And here's serendipity for you. Tully Ingersol just "happened" --! The other Hellgate player I'm working on is Harrison Shapiro, and he's a very major player. He's not quite right yet, but when he is, I'll also do his partner, Jon Kim, at the same time. Mel Keegan is a lot less "picky" about Jon than about Shapiro, which allows me a lot more latitude.

So here you have Michael 4 wearing the Neftis Mullet hairdo, and the Cold Life costume (with the overshirt from Stylin', with the texture changed out to denim my me); the set is Section 15, and I have one distant light set for ambiance and two spotlights set, with deep shadow maps. I put about 30% reflection on the set, to make it a bit more "lively" in the renders, but otherwise it's just as-as. Nice!

Jade, 17 April

UPDATE:

Just logged into Renderosity, where I'm uploading to a gallery in this last week, and saw one of their news items. The new Vue -- 9.5 -- is coming out right about now. So I bounced over to YouTube to see one of their demo reels. Whooo! You have got to check this out -- and DO click the icon to see it FULL SCREEN. This is amazing ... oooh, the stuff that powerful computers can do: