Well, I said I was going to get this Genesis 8 dud something to wear, and this was on sale...! It's a kind of Mad Max - Road Warrior style thing; I'm sure I saw something like it in one of the movies. I also changed the hair color and eye color ... am having a kind of love-hate relationship with IRay, partly because it actually demands a more powerful machine than I posses right now (and the system I need costs upwards of two grand. Ack), and partly because the learning curve is like the north face of the Eiger for someone who's spent ten years in the 3Delight engine. Sure, I'm getting there, but the render times are loooong, there's about 500% more still to learn (including the dForce dynamic fabric thing), and everything is so expensive. *Sigh*
Anyway, we persevere, and come up with fairly nice pictures while we run 4,722 experiments. Like:
These are actually not high-rez images: best I can do -- about 100 minutes per render; that's what you see here. The longest render I've done to date was about six hours, and the computer doesn't like it. It runs too hot ... have you ever seen 'the blue screen of death' on your system? Uh huh. I just saw it, about ten minutes ago. Going to have to be very, very careful with this computer, or I'm going to melt it down! So the object is to treat it gently and not ask the impossible of it. Right? Right.
Not as much art as I'd wanted to share today ... IRay just takes so long, I get through about 25% of what I'd wanted to do! Makes you kind of long for the old days when you could get a raytrace in ten minutes flat. (Or perhaps you just go to the IT Warehouse website and drool over systems. I did that not half an hour ago, and picked out what I want. They call it their 'i5 Gamer Elite;' it retails for a cool A$2,149 and it would do the job. All I need now is a winning lottery ticket!)
More in a few days. Dave and I are taking Monday and Tuesday off, out of town, so I'm turning the machines off as soon as I hit "publish" on this, and I'll be back on Wednesday, all being well. Ciao for now, folks...
