Sorry I don’t know your language, but I see you visiting! I always find it interesting when I see a spike in my traffic from a particular site, and it seems like cafe.naver.com has a link to my site in regards to the Renderman article I linked to last time. I’m not 100% sure about the google translation of this site, so I just want to clarify that it was someone else who wrote the article, but I’m glad that I was able to help other people find out about it! In other Houdini related news, you may be interested to know that your time to win a copy of Houdini Master is NOW! I’m currently working on making another tutorial series for Houdini, however there is no E.T.A. on when that shall arrive. I just had a chance to check out the new Digital Tutors training on Mantra however, and can safely say that it’s worth checking out if you’re interested in getting into rendering.
It’s been a while since my last post… my evenings have been eaten up quite heavily due to my decision to switch to Vista.
It all started when I decided that I should check out Adobe CS4. I was pretty excited actually, because when I bought my machine a couple of years ago, I got a 64bit quad core machine with a Quadro FX video card, and 6 gb of ram. When I found out that CS4 seemed to be designed for a 64bit environment with highend video cards in mind I wet my pants. Mentally. Anywhoo, I tried the trial of CS4, only to discover that the new GPU features weren’t designed with Windows x64 in mind. For shame, Adobe. So I took a chance and upgraded to Vista. I’ll spare you the spiel about how many fucking versions of this OS there are. I feel almost as confused as when I think about which Linux distribution I should consider.
So after spending some cash on Microsoft, I discovered that the Bios on my computer was a couple of years old, and disagreed with having Vista on it… it took me a couple of days to figure this out, but when I upgraded from version 2 to version 8, suddenly Vista seemed to be much more co-operative except for the fact that my expensive Quadro video card was not working properly. I discovered that while NVidia has drivers for the Quadro FX 4400 (my card), it actually isn’t on their Vista compatibility list and so doesn’t actually work. There appear to be a number of people on the net complaining that their Quadro 4400’s aren’t working in Vista… no response from NVidia on the matter. Though to be fair, there also appear to be reports of some people running 2 of them at the same time… Fun. So I decided “what the heck… printer manufacturers, scanner manufactureres, Adobe, Macintosh… they all have their hate on for XP… let’s just stick with Vista and try to move forward”.
So I bought a new video card, the NVidia Geforce GTX 280 that comes overclocked by BFG. For those considering the GTX280, keep in mind that this thing is the size of a short bus. I had to remove the blue safety clips from my Dell case so that I could close everything back up after installing this puppy. Though technically it’s not installed at the moment. I’m still using my original Quadro NVS 285 that came with the computer since I discovered that the GeForce card requires more power cables than what came with the Power Supply Unit in my Dell Precision 490. So now I’m awaiting my new Antec power supply which I’m hoping will solve all my problems.
I also had like a gallon of blood taken the other day when I went in for a physical. Afterward I went over to EBGames and picked up Guild Wars. I guess I do silly things when I have computers that barely work and am barely able to stay conscious. Keep in mind when looking at the screengrab to your left, that I’m using one of the weakest video cards available on the market and so must turn the graphics quality down while playing at the moment. That said, I’m sure the graphics won’t blow me away when I do have my good card working. I’ve been playing it a little though, and it’s fun so far. I’ve never gotten into MMORPG’s because I don’t believe in being taxed each month to be allowed to play the game that you purchased. Guild Wars doesn’t suffer from this problem. I say kudos to that. On a side note, EBGames is no more.