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ok, I think this is as far as I'm going to push the cutout mesh. It is already going to be a Bane to UV map as it is with the extra edge loops.
I'll add the voice coil and suspension, later on.
this should be good enough for a part of the speaker that is not that visible anyway, lol.
As for the midrange and tweeter in the sattalight, Beyond some crude geometry to mark out the dimensions of the back of the speaker, I am not going to waste my time doing frame cutouts for those speakers.
It's stuff that simply is not visible from the outside, and the speaker mounting holes will be enough grief as it is.
Because it is a new page, just as a reminder why I'm not that worried about the small details of the subwoofer inside the end table on the left, lol.
Following your project with Great Interest;) Now I only wish you'd add some Violent Soundpressure Morphs (VSM)
Agreed, I've been wanting to model the sub for over a decade, and the other speakers as well. You will have to forgive me, as I was slightly distracted the past few days.
I feel it was worth it tho.
Also, my apologies Fisty, the chat ended just as the other thing was starting up. The other reason I'm not ready to attempt to rig the hand device set, is it's not ready for that. The mesh is a mess, and it isn't even UV mapped yet. I still have so much to do on that, before it is even ready to save as a DazStudio Prop to start rigging it up. The fingers are separate objects from the thumb parts, so it is a lot of parts, lol.
I know I've been absent on the forum for a few days, I've been looking into a lot of stuff, and rolling ideas around and playing geometric puzzles, in the midst of it all, I got a bit of important info from a friend. So I have a lot to go over, from lipstick modifications to difficulties with windows10 and GIMP to bookshelf speaker ideas and Cap mods for High Power stuff. First off.
Yes, this year, finals will not be preventing him from going, as in years past.
It's down to funding. I and a few others really do want to see Buildzoid go to Computex, and I got distracted the past few days trying to come up with some cool renders for that. June 5 to 9 is a bit off, tho his patreon funding alone will not cover the Buildzoid vs Computex Expedition alone, as that is a rather small channel. He talks about it in the last 5 min of this vid, a good vid on cooling limitations. One reason I do like Buildzoid's views, is he doesn’t need to worry about saying the truth about bad stuff a sponsor has on display, he can speak his mind on stuff, lol. That also means there is no Sponsor to help pay for the trip.
When I first heard him say he wanted to go, I timidly made a few shirt designs for the unofficial AHOC fan-girl (FWSA Sandi was honestly a random dice roll for testing the shirt on) and was cautiously not saying much as I did not know if it was funding or other Life-related things that would be a challenge for Buildzoid getting to Computex. Knowing it was just the funding side of things, I spent the past day, fussing with a random makeup idea that turned out to be more tedious than I thought it would be, lol.
Yes, the gran-merge with the stock diffuse map is not shown for TOS reasons, as the rest of that is Fred's and Sabby's work. I took the eye makeup reflection map, and turned it into an opacity map for an orange layer and grain merged that over the diffuse map to get some cool AHOC orange eyeliner of a sorts.
That came out ok, I then gave lipstick a try, and my lipstick drawing skills in GIMP are no better than the resulting fluorescent orange soda stain looks in the spot render, lol. I wasted a day trying various shades of orange and darkens values, and it just didn't look good at all, lol. Fred and Sabby's original dark red really looks the best for some reason. I do like that orange-tinted Eyeliner, so I may try something like that later on, tho that will be a long day of bouncing between GIMP and spot-rendering in Daz Studio, and I have other things to do. And that is a good segue into the other thing, GIMP and windows 10 vs Daz Studio. Ugh Why! ... TBC. (1 of 3)
I noticed with the side-grade from Windows XP that had a perfectly aligned mouse courser interface to Windows 7, that highlighting text to copy and paste it was hit or miss at best. Windows 7 constantly selects the letter before or after the letter the curse is actually over, and that makes spell and grammar checking stuff via Google web search a bit of a PITA. Windows 10 brings that to a new level with the navigation tools for moving around a scene in Daz Studio. Half the time I click to select the rotate or move thing, the view-field instantly transports off to some random location, and that makes positioning lights and cameras near impossible that way. I have tried multiple graphics and track ball drivers and even swapped the track ball with the known good one on the windows 7 machine with the same exact result, Half the time I click the rotate or move thing I end up off in a random location in the scene. It is actually easier, to stuff the entire scene and textures onto a USB stick, copy them to the windows 7 box, set up the lights and cameras there, copy that back to the USB stick and then run that on the Windows 10 box for the final render. It's like every single part of the Windows 10 GUI is a complete failure for getting work done, Ugh, Why! lol. It has almost nothing to do with making Windows 10 look like Windows XP, the click interface of Windows 10 simply does not work for getting stuff done in a timely manner. 75% of the time I right click something on the task bar to open a new copy of the app, the right click menu simply does not appear, and the rest of the time it does show up the open a new copy of this window is not in the menu. That in itself makes the pin-to thing a complete fail as a replacement for the Windows XP quick launch bar. And speaking of stuff removed from Windows 10 that negatively impacts productivity.
Hay, GIMP dev team, remember that window, the one that shows you what the RGB value is for the pixel the courser is over in the image, Why have y'all removed that from the Windows 10 install version of GIMP? It is Not in the "View -> Image Properties" menu, There is no "Image Properties" thing at all on the windows 10 install of GIMP. And the CTRL+Shift+i also does not bring up that window, it is literally gone!? Once again I'm copying projects to a USB stick, to do stuff on the Windows 7 box that you simply can not do on windows 10. To add insult to injury, I wasted a few hours truing to get that Pointer Info thing open on windows 10 version of GIMP, only for the RGB value I was looking for to be pointless anyway. The color of the lipstick mask is drastically off from the end result after being combined with the lip skin color anyway, so it ended up being a day of blind color adjustments before I got the orange remotely close to matching the orange on Sandi's shirt.
I can say these things, not only because they are actually happening to me, they are by the way. I don't need to worry about Microsoft or the GIMP foundation having a PR nightmare over me sharing my experience with Y'all, and deciding to yank the funding for my Flight home from Taipei and the hotel room and whatever else. I am not in a hotel, by the way, the point being, they are not the hand feeding me and I don't need to sweat saying something they may not want others to hear about there products. And to go full circle, That is why I would love for Buildzoid to go to Computex, and to get his thoughts on the stuff there. Case and point.
I have the utmost respect for Der8our, the guy does incredible work, and came up with an Epic computer case design. Out of all the vids I watched covering that case, not one of them mentioned the simple fact that the fans at the bottom of the case are literally inside the lower two PCI slots on the motherboard. It's just like all the other cases that say you can put a radiator in the top of the case when there actually is no room above the motherboard for anything to fit there, lol.
I suspect no one mentioned that because they were worried about making Der8our feeling bad and pissing off there sponsors at the same time. I don’t think Buildzoid would be so caushis with omitting critical flaws in the new stuff coming out before it hits the market and it's too late to change it. TBC. sorry about the win10 rant, lets talk cap mods and speakers next. (2 of 3)
Likewise on a brighter note, When Buildzoid says something is good, it is truly good. You will not need to worry about the motherboard not being able to handle the power draw of Iray or 3delight bringing the machine to its knees so hard that a mp3 file will not play, for days on end. Speaking of power draw, a slight side story about the difference between power delivery of consumer stuff, and big-guns computers with power delivery that is designed and built to not be phased by heavy loads that would annihilate the consumer stuff.
Power delivery can in a way be imagined like the flow of a fluid through pipes (quite literally in many ways), like the pipes from the tank in a car to the engine vs the fuel lines from the LOX tanks to the F1 engines in the Saturn V. Drastically different quantities of fuel flow and forces involved. When a fuel line in a car has a sharp bend that causes a restriction in fuel flow, the engine gets held back a little bit at full throttle and nothing bad happens. During the development of the Saturn V, a slight anomaly with fuel flow past the expansion joints was all it took to cause the rocket to completely annihilate its self during launch. Because there was so much force shoving the fuel down at the engines through the fuel lines that went through the other tank, the smallest change in fuel flow in the expansion joints would cause them to fail, and it took a few tries’s to get that corrected. A consumer car would never be exposed to such forces and the fuel lines don't need to be made to the same caliber of fluid dynamic consistency. The Saturn V tho not only had massively more force and fluid flow, the pressure at the engine nozzles needed to be perfectly consistent or the entire thing would end up in a shebang show. I feel the power system in a Gaming PC vs a workstation that is on there knees for days on end, is drastically different in the same way. In a game, if the power is not 100% consistent in voltage at the chips, and a bit flips in a calculation, the worst that happens is a few pixels are off on the screen and it has no lasting effect on consecutive calculations of pixels on the following frames. With 3D rendering or Protein simulations on something like the Titan V for example, if any calculation gets a flipped bit from any voltage fluctuation on the power at all, it has a cascading effect on all the calculations after that and the entire simulation/render run must be thrown out and run again. That is part of why I bother with Cap modding the PSU wires in my computers, and why the placement of the caps are far more critical than the aesthetic looks of where the caps are in the PC.
The length of the power and common wires going to the capacitor bank is critical. Especially when the VRM is pulsing with amps that far exceed the max ripple current of the individual capacitors. Not only because of the amount of amps involved with high-end desktop processors, because out of phase ripples from bad capacitor lead length matching turns the power wires into a folded element transition antenna. And in an era of tempered glass and plexiglass cases windows with zero RF shielding properties at all, and massive holes in the motherboard tray that let RF through like it's not even there, it is kind of important to not have long wires in the computer being RFI transmitters. So I've also spent the past few weeks drawing in MS paint, and fussing with cylinders and caps in Daz studio to figure out something that will fit in the PM01 case. I can't just make a duplicate of what I have in the FX8350 box, because the space around the 12v plug on the motherboard is drastically thinner than that original capacitor bank. And that has not been the only geometric puzzle I've been fussing with, lol. And that brings me back to the speaker that I have no sketches or models of yet, lol. I've been just thinking about how the box boards can be mounted together in a simple way to not have sound reflecting of the inside of the box back at the speaker. I haven’t sketched anything out yet, because it's been busy. (end of 3 of 3) Back to the normal madness, lol.
ok, mid-range speaker box ideas 101.
Given the fact that there is a subwoofer, I need not use a ported box resonator to fake lower end bands and can go with something with a tad more precise sound reproduction. Osculating subwoofers work, because for the most part, most don’t care about osculating ringing in the lower frequencies, mostly. with higher frequencies tho, it does have a negative impact on the sound reproduction, especially with drums and vocals. I have opted to simply not use ported designs for a simple reason. There only good for making small boxes loud, and are not good at all for flat response across a frequency spectrum, nor are they good for stuff that a ringing speaker would degrade the intelligibility of the sound. Ported resonator boxes are not the only way a box can ring like a bell, Reflections off the inner walls back at the speaker cone can also do that. One trick to reduce the strength of the internal reflections is to line the inside of the box with some type of sound absorbing stuff, tho that alone has it's limits. for a few reflection paths, the sound travels through the sound absorbing stuff only twice before getting back to the speaker.
so, one trick that is used in some speakers is to have the inside of the box at odd angles to prevent a single reflection back at the speaker, like my horrible box on the right of the above doodle. Every time the sound bounces, it ends up going through the sound absorbing stuff again and getting reduced in strength. I've been rolling that around in the back of my mind for the past month, how to get the inside of the box, to not have a single path lead back to the speaker without at least a couple of bounces around the sound-absorbing stuff.
So, the gist of what I'm thinking of, involves the front of the speaker tapered some to bounce most of the sound back to the back of the box, and have most of it ending up trapped in a second chamber. I say the other sketch is bad, because a box that shape would have almost no strength to resist ballooning from the pressure of the sound in the box from the speaker, so a more robust design is what I've been thinking of with a similar effect. This is far form a final design, it is only a brief overview of the things I'm looking at.
And as mentioned before, not the only thing I'm working on. On that, it would be interesting to see if a computer case could use such techniques to dampen sound
Ugh, Note to self, Save everything in the 3D editor apps, before walking across the room to top off the coffee cup.
Needless to say, everything I had done after that initial marked-up 3D drawing has been lost, thanks to Microsoft's insistence on installing a Graphics driver that keeps crashing. 390.77, and even 391.01 is no better in that regard.
So it looks like there are 2 more updates since then, I will see if that makes things better at all.
I will not instantly know, as the graphics driver crashing is sporadic at best.
Microsoft, Doing everything they can to reduce Productivity. lol.
well, I thought that may take some time, as it had been a couple of days since the last time 391.01 had crashed on me with Hexagon and Daz studio open, and losing all my work cuz the Nvidia driver crash took out those programs as well.
I had done a couple of quick tests with 391.24 and now I know why there was such a rush to get 391.35 out. As soon as I fired up Firefox (water fox 64bit version of Firefox) the 391.24 driver crashed twice within 5 minutes.
OK, that isn't going to work.Forget about the fact that anything other than Direct-X interfaces leaves the 391.24 driver in Comatose mode. The Card kicks up in clocks while the Daz Studio load splash screen is up, then drops back down as soon as that goes away. Leaving a view field that is painful to move around a scene at best
Why do I call it Comotose-mode, well, you can sit back, sip some coffee, or tee if that's your thing, and watch windows draw on your screen,
, line by line.
If this is the best that Nvidia can offer for Direct draw and OpenGL windows interfaces, Your better off just using an ATI Radeon 7000 AGP card, as that is orders of magnitude better with OpenGL window interfaces than the latest Pascal GPUs.
My Steveism, have we regressed in user-interface performance over the past ten years. So, on to Nvidia Driver 391.35 then.
You know it's bad, when you have better muscle memory of F8 to Safe mode to where DDU is located, than the stuff in the quick launch bar that you use all the time for work, like notepad and calculator, lol.
It still suffers from that Comotose-mode thing, At this point, that is all I have for you, I still need to do some more testing.
(edit)
for the past year and change, since I got Discord, I've been putting up with Notifications causing screen tearing that freezes the computer for around half a second, it gets really annoying when watching live events that I cant go back and watch what I missed.
It persists, False alarm. Unrelated problem anyway, Profesional Audio interfaces like the Roland UA-25EX does NOT do DirextX audio, and that causes windows to trip over its feet any time an app tries to use DirectX sound. Discord is literally the only app I've come across, that you can NOT tell it to use ANYTHING other than DirectX sound.
ok, it's been about a day, give or take, as I wasn't keeping track of when I did that install (knocks on desk), the 391.35 drive has not crashed yet.
In other news, it looks like some "Nvidia GTX 780s/780Tis/Titan(XM)s/980Tis are burning out their memory inductors a lot." I'm not too sure what to make of that, as I suspect some here have been using those cards for Iray, and I'll guess Iray really doesn't load down the cards as hard as other CUDA like stuff. I recall some time ago Mec4D had done some power tests, and her Titans were pulling far less power when doing Iray than they otherwise were rated for. I'll need to dig into this some, as I suspect more is going on than just a simple component failure. I think other circumstances are at play, more going on, and a combination of specific things that leads to the memory VRM inductors failing on some cards. And I say "some", as this has yet to be reported as an all cards suffer this regardless of what they were used for. It clearly is a problem for some as it is a few of them that all have the same symptoms.
FYI, Paul's Skincare and Makeup! has just let me know what day it is, lol. To the best of my knowledge, that memory VRM thing is NOT an April fools joke, I wish it was.
(left, DES Rosalind, costume 3DL shaders using the outfit's Iray maps. Right AS Kellyn shape mix, other 3DL Fisty and MJC shaders used on the outfit. The Broken sandals are not part of the outfit, I thought they were supposed to be black, lol)
Forget the Sandals, in any case. Regarding the SY Fantasy Wear Megapack, Thank you Sickleyield for figuring out and fixing whatever that was that broke Spacetime. Like FEA, I do not comprehend the inner workings of dForce, so I know I would not understand whatever it was that broke if it was explained to me. I've only seen results from FEA simulations in passing, and have a very basic understanding of what kind of mesh knots will break dForce.
The top for outfit 2 has some difficulty with some poses and figure shapes, tho works fine the rest of the time well enough.
There is I think one quad just barely hanging in there, lol. And the fix should be easy enough, as the quad selections need not be perfectly symmetrical to set up a new zone to not be dynamic using the tools tab things as described in a vid covering setting up hair for dForce.
I sort of fused with that a little bit in Daz Studio, and for the most part, it worked fine on another outfit, so long as the pose did not push the outfit beyond what would actually break the thing in reality, lol. The fix is not that difficult to do, and does not require a multi-thousand dollar per month rental program to address (unlike the sandals, lol). You do not need ZBrush, Maya, Marvalus designer, or any other mesh editor, the tool,s are in Daz Studio to fix it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3S6u9IRune0
It's not that difficult, and less involved than fussing with adjustment dials on a conforming outfit to get rid of poke through, and easier in the end. You go to the tools tab, select the surface select brush thing, paint a couple of quads, right click and create a new surface from selected, and you're done for the most part. Go to the surface tab and copy the surface texture from the original surface to the new one, set the dynamic strength on the new surface zone to zero, and walla, that's it. The SY Fantasy Wear Megapack doesn't need the fix all the time, so not that high on my scroll of broken stuff, lol.
OK, I had mentioned "forget the sandals", as they were not the set I had thought they were.
Such fond memories of having fun with FW Eve, Wachiwi, Aiyana and other G2F figures with the set shown above. This is a good point I guess to list all the reasons I'm not willing to just turn on back face lighting in the view field. The problems with breaking light angles with inverted normals go well beyond just not being able to see what you're doing setting up a scene, lol.
Just to illustrate this, I set up three spheres and three of the broken sandals with the same exact surfaces. High velvet felt, a Phoebe silk, and a gray mirror gloss ball.
Having the surface normals inside out, breaks Gloss, Velvet, reflection, and translucency angle of incidence calculations.
As you can see, the black felt has no felt on the inverted sandals, because there is no scene lights inside the sandal mesh. The Phobe silk is not silk looking because the gloss is coming from the wrong angles. And the reflections are all messed up with concave reflections from convex surfaces and convex reflections from concave surfaces. Last I checked, sandals are not made out of "metamaterials", so they should not be breaking basic fundamental properties of luminosity, lol.
That is a list of all the items I would need to fix, just to get half of the set usable for me. Both the G3F and G8F sandals ALL have the flipped normals. And to the best of my knowledge, the only way to fix that, involves re-rigging the corrected OBJs back onto G3F and G8F, and recreating all the bend and fit morphs from scratch. Not to say, the process of flipping all the mesh normals in a geometry editor for each item. Not to say, re-saving each item back out as a clothing item. That just about literally is everything involved with creating an outfit from scratch, something that is another realm from my meager static prop making skills. Only in this case, it is something that I paid for that the EUA/TOS will not allow me to share the fix for after all of that work.
, 
That! It will be easier to make the old G2F sandals work on G8F, lol.
That is why I look at inverted normals on products sold in the Daz Store the Same way Buildzoid was ranting about a Motherboard Bios that had a clear out all your settings syndrome when you touched the BCLK setting. It is not like that Loincloth that Sickleyield fixed that a newer version of Daz Studio broke something somewhere that was working fine in older versions of Studio. Inverted Normals viewed in Daz Studio's view field and in renders are in your face screaming "I am Broken", you can not miss them, lol. It is obvious the instant you import the OBJ into studio from whatever geometry editor your using, and all you can see is black. And that is the step, during the process of making an outfit that it is easy to fix, because you have yet to do any of the rigging and morphs, that would need to be made again from scratch after fixing it. oy vey!
I really do not care who made the sandals, because they're not the only item I've purchased that are broken like this. The point is, stuff like this should not be in the Daz3d store, it should never have made it that far with broken geometry, to be honest. This is the failure of the PA's, Beta testers, Daz3d Product submission QA staff, and the Promo makers, Everyone is at fault for not noticing that the normals were inside out. Let's take this as a Learning experience, and move on, I never want to see inverted normals on a product sold in the Daz3d store, Again.
This is NOT a "fix" for inverted normals, Leve Backface Lighting OFF and correct the normals on the object before rigging it if your making outfits for the Daz3D store.
I may have something, for fixing that in Daz Studio, screen-capping now... OK, after some blind clicking, I think I found something, that will be useful for PA's a tad more than me. (yes, I went back to screen-cap the select all step on the skirt)
Flipping normals back around in Daz Studio, it's easy for a PA to do! It was finding the tools that was the difficult part.
to flip the normals on the entire thing, is super easy.
Step 1 is to select the item in the scene tab, go to the tool tab, and select the surfaces in that tab (using the ctrl+left-click or shift arrows method), then right-click the view-field and select all.
Now with the entire item selected, right-click the view-field again, and select "Geometry Editing" -> "Flip Normals of Selected Polygon(s)". Then save the thing
some how 
, again, cloth making is not my thing.
To flip just some of the surface zones, well, I'm still figuring out the select part of the process. I did get there just blindly clicking stuff in the tool tab tho. lol.
the top took a bit of blind clicking and flipping normals to get it all close, as not ALL of the normals needed to be flipped.
I did eventually get it there, using the '+' and '-' things in the Geometry Editor tab thing (to select the zones to flip). Saving it so that will stick every time I use the outfit is another matter tho. The PA's that make these things at least appear to know how to save outfits, so I don't think I need to explain the rest.
Not that I even know the beginnings of saving a prop to auto parent and conform to the shape of a figure with all the pose following stuff anyway, lol. Fixing the normals turned out to be a hell of a lot simpler then I thought it would be, I guess it can be done in Daz studio instead of in a geometry editor program (like Marvelous Designer or ZBrush).
Before someone starts making a How to save a wearable item followup, I will point out that the steps outlined would need to replace the broken items in the smart tab, not just add a new set of items in some random place in the content library, for it to be a true fix. Something that would just be a lot better if the PA that made this stuff did, so we all can benefit from the fix.
You'd be amazed at how easy it is to miss a flipped normal, thankfully I use UV Layout and it's (usually) pretty obvious if it's wrong when I do the UV mapping, but I still check in Hex before I save out the final obj. (Down in the lower right corner by the button that makes the mesh transparent in the veiwport there is a button that looks like a tube, that turns display of backfaces on and off, then just spin the thing around and it's easy to tell)
Amen brother!
And often it's not just a small spot missed in a clothing item but - wait a minute - a whole door. Oh yeah, someone just scaled it inside out to make a mirrored version.
^ yeah. Hard to miss entire outfits being inside out as well, lol.
Fisty, I have been there with individual quads flipping over when welding together parts to make something. It behaves very oddly in Hexagon, and some UV mappers will complain to no end over individual flipped quads in a mesh. It can be a pain to figure out how to fix it the first time (been there in the past). Flipping an entire object inside out tho, that is another matter entirely, lol.
I was just going through some stuff, and noticed a few things. I guess I'll start with the hair, as I'm sure I have not used much at all in the past for one reason most of all, it does not play well with elf ears. It's not the PAs fault, it's just the style of hair that it is. I will say Thank you AprilYSH for the 3DL and Iray labels on the mat icons for the hair, so much better than another style I had to hunt through the content library to figure out what presets were for what render engine within the past day. And another nice thing, is that this appears to be one of the very few hairstyles that do not completely hide the eyebrows, again thanks. Render times on the hair are not instantaneous, yet not as bad as some others I've had to endure up close as in this spot render. OK, that said, on to the figure that has turned out to be a pleasant surprise.
I pulled up the product page for Madeline to find out what PA and how to spell the figure name to save the figure as a scene subset, and noticed something that had me a tad beside myself in a good way. I paid less for Madeline than another figure, yet this figure had All the maps included, unlike the other figure. The other figure is not unusable, just, not all of the "Stuff" is there. I can understand not having that when it is questionable, the rest of the time tho, it's more of a Why not just toss in the extra 3 possibly 4 maps to complete the mat set. It's not like making another shader set for another rendering engine, it's 3 maps, lol.
Another thing that surprised me, was Madeline did not take over forty minutes to compute subsurface scatter before doing the spot render. It was less than 2 minutes. Bravo, if only the past few years of HD figures were like that, lol. I do note that the Promo lighting is drastically different than the test chamber, and I do like the appearance in the promos, so this will be the last time Y'all see her like that, I will be adjusting the skin tone to be closer to what is in the promos for use from here on out.
(Edit) I may not have had gotten to dialing in the figure shape in that spot render, oops.
OK, Lets see if I can get a coherent thought out this morning without life distracting me, lol. I'm sorry, I've only been trying to get the followup to the last post, screen-capped, rendered, and cobbled together into a post for a few days now, lol. So at this point it's a bit of a mess on my end, a tad more than what PA's did well or made mistakes on.
. so your luck may vary depending on how auto-follow feels that day, and if the PA that made the figure shape your forcing the outfit onto had mistakenly uploaded shaping dials to daz using some beta genesis shape ERC-froze saves or a proper release version of genesis shape ERC-froze saves, and if daz ever got around to sending the correct figure shape dials threw whatever install platform your using, or not. 
I'm sorry Fisty, that was supposed to sound good, somehow. Well, as you can see with "FaD dForce Eveningwear" forced onto "TwiztedMetal Madeline", When your not fighting Auto-follow, mismatching projection morphs, or general flakiness of dForce in general, it all works ok, lol.
. My apologies TwiztedMetal, anything over 50% on the shaping dials for Madeline is a tad too much Barbie for my tastes, otherwise not bad at all 
. On to the next thing on my scroll, lol.
Between that and z370 (intel), mATX (micro-ATX) and other stuff, Well, where do I begin, I don't even know, lol. I guess I'll start with that outfit Madeline is wearing, It's short for the moment till I get more renders done. My G8M collection isn't all-encompassing so I'm still yet to test how dForce in general reacts to the more TOS-iffy side with some particular equipment on G8M with "FaD dForce Eveningwear". I do know the outfit works well without any G8M Pro Bundles, and Auto-fitting it onto the other gender has mixed results for reasons not related to the dress. Madaline worked fine first try, and another figure not shown here (I may just ask for a refund for her, it's bad, lol) the outfit instantly exploded.
Also, I've noticed that doing the dForce sim with plenty of room between the figures before putting them back to there locations for a render, isn't always a given to work, even with miles between them, lol. Sometimes you need to just do the sim for each figure in an empty scene with no other figures and d-force stuff, and importing the result via Scene-subset back into the full scene for each figure with dForce stuff. Something about to much stuff being simulated at the same time in the same scene, makes for slow going and more flaky dForce behavior in general.
HpUki Equipment shaders, and eyebrows, oops, I didn't notice the eyebrows were missing in that first render, My bad. I noticed the eyebrows last night when I was fussing around with the surface shaders. I sort of noticed that the equipment wasn't getting switched to 3DL shaders, no matter what I had selected, and I eventually gave up on that and just plugged in the AoA shader from scratch. Unlike some other figures, at least the maps are there for the equipment. So it was just a matter of applying the 3DL shader and hunting down the maps for each surface attribute. I sort of wish the eyebrows had worked a tad better in anything other than Iray, By then I gave up and started porting everything over to a quicker non-subsurface shader anyway, and it was getting late (Face keyboard). I have a sneaking supposition as to why "TwiztedMetal Madeline" and HpUki did not face-plant for over twenty minutes each on the "R7 1700 GN build" (that would be over 40 minutes on the FX8350, per AoA HD figure), the included 3DL shader thing appears to have only used the Diffuse and bump maps, and left all the other attributes map-less. I'm not Shure that is what the PA had intended, I am happy with the resulting render times tho.
Ah, yes, Fibermesh vs geo-Shell-thing brows, ugh, this post is getting long and I still have a laundry list of stuff to cover. I have no clue how they look in Iray, however, they also lack 3DL presets. The Geo-Shell-thing is just a mess in 3delight for so many reasons, ugh. The Fibermesh at least works, even if there is no 3DL conversion preset for it. And to be honest, they at least function with applying the DS shader onto them without turning the figure into a victim of a white-out factory malfunction, lol. To be fair, the PA could not have made the eyebrows things more in my face with the icons, I just clicked past that folder as I had already dialed in the figure shape and was looking for the mats for her at the time. As you can see, I did get it to work, so good enough, and very attractive figure Hinkypunk
(in the voice of Dj Dooku "Are you ready, to move your bodies, to the sound of sonic perfection")
OK, another topic. mATX (that’s, micro-ATX, not iTX) and a second render/Stream-capture rig with the 8700k. Or any computer that needs to have more than one PCI card and be smaller than a full-size ATX system. I was starting to think the 8700k would make a nice second smaller box for running Promo renders on while you work (or play) on your primary workstation. After seeing the Buildzoid vid on the ASUS Strix Z370-G Gaming board, and the followup Channel Update vid, I sadly must admit that there are no mATX motherboards that would survive an 8700k running 3D renders for days on end as it's sole purpose in life.
to paraphrase Buildzoid from another vid, the VRMs would probably "do it", the VRM caps on the motherboard will just be dead in a short amount of time.
That said, It sort of ads a double insult as well. One being that x299 had similar issues with underrated VRMs and this is basically a repeat of that all over again. The other being that Intel insisted that the new socket was needed due to the Power requirements only for motherboard makers to be merely copying and pasting the z270 VRMs onto the z370 boards. And if that wasn't enough, that is not considering the cooling or lack of cooling that modern computer cases deliver for such a bad VRM. Remember 'This' from Gamers nexus?
Well, apparently OvenMaster hasn't figured it out. And this is not just a middle of the lineup case being marketed as "High Air Flow", this Q300P (That HardwareCanucks looked at) is so bad that it is affecting the clocks of the GPU, in a bad way. And that will affect GPU Iray/Reality/etc render times, lol.
It wasn’t bad enough that the H500P had fans close to an impermeable wall of plastic, they made it closer with even less intakes around the sides of the front panel. And putting them LED fans behind that Pizza-pan Grating just, just, well, Why bother with the LED fans and the clear plastic at that point.
That combined with the Pizza-pan grating behind the fans makes for near nothing for airflow and an airflow patron practically guaranteed to make any fan mounted flush up against it noisier. That last nid-bit gives me some doubts about the smaller cozen, the Q300L with that cool looking magnetic filter stuck to it on the front and top.
Other than the doubts about the airflow properties of the Pizza-pan grating, the Q300L looks a lot better than the Q300P, and it's far more affordable. That's not to say, there are no other options for a mATX build. It's just that it makes a cool running VRM just that much more critical for a mini-secondary-compute box to have on the side of the desk. I had just watched a vid on another case that I knocked rather hard for having fan mounts inside the PCI slot space, and I will admit I am pleasantly surprised. It looks like the "Lian Li O11 Dynamic" may be an option, tho a tad larger than mATX. With a mATX system in that case, the lower intake fans would not be so much of a problem as it would with a full ATX system that needs to use the PCI slots.
In all Der8auer and Lian Li did do a really nice job on the case. I like it given how the lower fans don't impact cooling that much in the end.
I don't think I need to sell the idea of having a second mini-compute box on the side for doing stuff that would otherwise make your primary workstation unusable for hours on end. The question is if the smaller motherboards can survive the prolonged CPU abuse, and if the small cases that are available can adequately keep the system cool under such circumstances. Would the cost be worth it, if you need to replace the 8700k and motherboard on an annual bases, because the VRM caps expire prematurely from excessive heat.
Oh, 5k Hours is only 208 days, not even a year.
ok, looking at some rather simple stuff. Sort of thinking about a joke about modern trends for smaller computers at the expense of everything else.
Well, I don't want a volcano on my desk melting hols through the floor with it's VRM lava. I also don't want a screaming banshee within a few feet of where I work. So I guess the only thing I must give on is size, or at the least the flashy Tempered Glass RGB convection oven craze has to go, lol. Every surface that is Tempered Glass is not absorbing noise and only reflecting it out of the computer. Restricted intakes and exhausts also do nothing other than making fans noisier than they need be and reduce the cooling potential of the computer case.
So this was an idea I had a very long time ago for a silenced cover to put on the front of a computer. Plenty of room for air to flow through, and no direct line of sight paths for sound to get out of there. Or at least reducing the amount of noise getting out of the computer anyway.
The problem is, that thing is huge and adds a significant depth to the computer. Thankfully, part of that can become something useful, and add even more sound absorbing side walls between the intakes and the fans.
Now granted, a choice between type of drive and high airflow for the GPU and CPU is going to need to be made.
I've seen so many hard drive racks that have no room at all between the drives for air to move through the rack slammed right up against intake fans so that nothing can get any good amount of cooling. There is a better way, it just requires a small amount of room to space out the drives, and to actually have vent openings in the drive rack that actually line up with the space between the drives. There is no reason to have a solid wall of metal between a fan and the hard drives, lol.
I could make the space between the drives a tad larger, however, that does not take into account the space on each side of the case around the HDD rack. Also, I have a height restriction, the distance between the floor and the bottom of my keyboard tray on my desk.
The more I think about the ZDG WS1 (Workstation1, that's not a very creative name), the more I like the case concept as a primary workstation case. The question I guess is, can a smaller mATX case be made that does not impact the max boost clock of the GPUs (plural) from bad thermals with lack of airflow, or something sitting on your work desk that sounds like being on the Saturn V launchpad during launch.
Something to think about I guess. It's not like a mini-compute box 'needs' to have ten hard drives, a boot drive, apps/games drive, and a bunch of Solid-state cache drives, lol.
And again, 5k Hour rated motherboards will still be dead even with a well-ventilated case. Cooling can't fix a short life rated capacitor, like whats on the ASUS Strix Z370-G Gaming. 208-day 105c rating is only slightly longer at 90c, lol.
Well, I had wanted to post this yesterday, and here it is a day later, funny how life does that to you sometimes. So I had been thinking of how to squeeze an iTX or mATX system parts into a small box shape without making it impossible to build the system or have a heat trap, lol. I did sort of get distracted a tad tho.
So, Zev0 did some really nice on Molly HD for G8F
, I'm just not sure I did so well with the pose and lack of expressions, oops. Oh, ears, not all of the figures shown have elf ears included. FW EVE (fussing with the computer parts) and EJ Bellaluna (lower left) have Elf ears. I am using Izabella7 ears on LY Jessenia, I used FWSA Khloe ears on Zev0 Molly, and I used Karyssa8 ears on HP Uki. I honestly ran out of room around the table for a camera and another figure, and I actually wanted to just fuss around with piling them parts in different ways to work out a cool mini-compute box idea. On to other stuff, while I try to ketchup after yesterday.
It looks like for once, something that I liked at a trade show, actually made it to a production product without all the stuff I liked being replaced with lesser stuff. I'm still not sure how the Bios is on the new zen+ (Ryzen2000) x470 Gaming 7 board (I've been asking around) however I really like the VRM system. That is a board that will not be prematurely killing caps from excessive heat from the VRM. so yes, REAL HEATSINKS
, for once in like ten years. Now if only case makers could grasp that the ATX specification actually has a airflow and minimum CFM spec for computers. I do hope Case master treats HardwareCanucks better than they did for Gamers Nexus after what Dmitry said about one of there lower end mATX cases. Now granted my copy of the spec is rather dated from when I was actually making my own computer case and wanted it to be to ATX specification (About 2005 ish and a few years prior).
Now I do know that modern graphics cards can produce over two-hundred watts of heat, and modern Processors can produce similar amounts of heat (over 200 watts). I am sure the latest standard still has a few pages after the updated chart explaining how to determine minimum CFM to achieve the max temp allowed for the air at the components. If the computer case cannot keep the air temp below that max temp limit, it simply does not meat the ATX specification. It is not Steve at Gamers Nexus or Dmitry at HardwareCanucks being vindictive to the people at Cooler Master, or any other computer case maker, it has nothing to do with anything personal. If it does not meet the minimum specification, it simply does not meet the minimum specification, period.
ok, some good and sad news. First off, Buildzoid deciding to not go to computex and get boards to test instead, is a good thing. It will allow him to focus on what he does without worrying about what manufacturers think of what he's saying about there stuff (and it's not all bad). I have a Gigabyte x370 Gaming 5, because it had a VRM that he liked, and his breakdown of it convinced me that the x370 Gaming k7 and/or x370 Gaming 5 would be the board that will survive being a 3delight render box without dying within 208 days. It just needed a "Real Heatsink
" like ALL the boards the past ten years.
Speaking of that, Steve and crew at Gamers Nexus did some thermal testing to see just how good the VRM is on the x470 Gaming 7, and I am even more impressed now. That I'm sure is a VRM that would be happy in a quiet computer, not just a render box. I even feel sort of like one of the ones that convinced them to do something other than going with the trend of featureless blocks with my mods and then outright replacement of there VRM block with a true heatsink. And that was a block with more surface area stock then I've seen on a lot of blocks the past ten years. Thank you Gigabyte. I just really wish that heatsink would have been used on the x470 gaming 5 as well (that's the sad news).
I'm still not convinced about any of the other boards as of yet, b350 is a no-go for anything prolonged compute-intensive, and I've yet to see any good mATX (micro-ATX) boards for either AM4 or the 8700k. The entire Mini-compute box, maybe a wash before even figuring out the layout of the case for the thing.
I have first-hand experience with motherboards with inadequate VRM cooling in a computing box, the one above made it only a month before the capacitors gave out. The only board I feel comfortable with saying is a good one for a render machine or workstation as of now is the Gigabyte x470 Gaming 7. The x470 Gaming 5 lacks the heatsink, and I have no clue what it has for fets under the thermal mas blocks. Back to good news.
At least it looks like there is a very good CPU to put on that x470 Gaming 7 board, that does rather well for rendering tasks. The AMD R7 2700x even at stock is very impressive for such a task. There is just the matter of DDR4 if you do not already have the stuff for such a build.
and with going memory prices, that sort of makes any new builds painful at best, without even looking at graphics cards.
I think it was something like 10 thousand miles between oil changes back in the day. I guess I come from an era where it did not matter how you drove your brand new car, if the engine blew up before that 10 thousand miles was up, the engine was a lemon. I feel VRMs on motherboards are no different. If a motherboard claims it supports an 8700k, the VRM should not blow up, no matter what load you put on the CPU, period. lol.
Well, I've been tossing a few things around in my head, one was a cute little compute box, something that iTX lacks the second slot for a dedicated CUDA compute card and or High bandwidth NAS connection card. It would need to be a mATX board, and I simply have not seen a good one with a solid VRM in some time. So I had to simply ditch the small box idea and go a tad larger for a Full ATX, ugh.
I'm still thinking about other stuff, like how to make it easy to get to the hard drives if there under the motherboard, lol.
I do have some choice words about some of the x470 full ATX motherboards I've seen, tho at least they're starting to get a clue I guess. At least the x470 Gigabyte Gaming 7 and the Crosshair VII Hero X470 look OK. Even if the Heatsink on the Gaming 7 is a bit of an insult for it not being on the lower end boards with VRMs that really could benefit from having a Real Heatsink
. It's like you have to go with the out of budget range board full of stuff you don't need for a compute box just so it won't die in a year, or you're stuck with inadequate VRMs on the stuff you can afford. I'm not liking these choices.
Because I'm well aware that not everyone has the tools and skills to just swap out stuff on a motherboard so it will survive being in a compute machine, as I tend to do a lot. It's closing in on summertime, and I've already had a few days of it getting up to 90F (32.222c) in here during the day.
I just have to say that these renders are so cute =))
I know, right?
Thank you, and thank you.
I had been tinkering with the scene for a while.
And it's still a bit of a Work In Progress, lol.
Some of it a few remakes from scratch kind of Wip
It would be cool if I could just call up Nvidia and ask them for the 3D model they used for there promo stuff, tho I doubt they would even be interested in entertaining the thought of providing a 3D model of a card for virtual fit testing in a fictional computer case.
I did look around last year, and what I found was pathetic at best, most being only a featureless block with a diffuse image map slapped on it, and none of them remotely resembled the actual dimensions of any expansion card standard that would be used in a computer. So, I make a Tesla, cuz it is the simplest of cards to 3D model, that isn't so old that it predates CUDA . After moving a few quads around to line things up, I think I'm about to go for the third from scratch, lol.
At least I have an idea what the dimensions are supposed to be for the card (That's better than most provide for there products, lol. Thanks Nvidia for the pdf.), it's just a matter of getting the geometry to line up with the decorative features of the card. Plus I don't need to reinvent the PCIe slot PCB, I already spent a good month making a PCB mesh to PCI-SIG spec last year, lol.
ok, after remaking the geometry from scratch a few more times, I'm happy with this, even tho it lacks the slight tilt along the edges of that actual card.
Good enough for fit testing in a virtual PC
Well, it's a bit of a sweltering weekend here in Southern Hoth. I do hope everyone had a good May the fourth and Cinco de Mayo. Some time ago, I had said some harsh words about someone's figure maps, it appears there has been a considerable effort in that area from the PA, thanks. I would like to point out one small note, as I know so many PAs insist on doing full figure morphs with no separate dials for anything. While I can understand that to a point, Let me make one small argument in favor of separate dials for some things, like pointy ears.
the ears on this figure, are only available on the full Alien body and head dial, the other dials are for the human variant and do not have ears to go with. See that anomaly over the ears in the hair, The only way to fix that, is to turn OFF Auto-follow on the Ear dial, and because that dial also controls the height, shape, and size of the head the hair is supposed to be on, that will not work without the hair ending up some where else in the scene disconnected from the figure.
I can understand now, why the figure with the cute ears, was never shown with hair, because the shaping dial doesn’t work with ears at all. Now, as much as I want to bug Marcius over fixing that, it really is more of a want compared to another issue that makes the Alien morph dial completely useless for use in a scene.
This was not what I originally thought of doing for a scene with the figure, however after seeing how the Alien morph dial broke the eye pose controls, well. (sad sigh) At least the work on the Diffuse maps is much improved, again, thanks for that. I suspect the eye thing is a simple checkbox that was mistakenly checked or unchecked when the ERC freeze was done to make the Alien dial. Sadly tho, I'm not really sure what one it would be, tho I will guess many other PA's that make figures know more about that stuff. Marcius, your not the first PA to have a cross-eyed figure dial, I have seen that before a few times. It must be a simple mistake and an easy fix.
The ear issue can usually be fixed.
Select the hair, go to the parameters tab (make sure you have Show Hidden checked on), find the ear morphs (typing 'ear' in the search field should do) en set all elf (and I presume alien) ear to 0%. This usually makes the pointy tips poke through the hair. Which, admittedly, looks better on some models than others, but it's a reasonable starting point.
yes, that is the fix. If, if, the ear is a separate dial from the rest of the figure. With the Alien variant of Marcius's Rapha for Genesis 8 Female, it is all one single dial. It can't be fixed without going back to Zbrush and removing the ear from the figure morph, and making it its own morph.
The fact that the eye orientation is all messed up in the Alien variant morph, is a tad more pressing of an issue tho. That breaks eye pose controls.