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Random top of page distraction.
left to right, FWSA Wanda costume Chiss eyes Liam hat Sweet Summer shirt costume meme texture, Blooming Pants with AElflaed's textures, Librarian's hair. next is FWSA Krisandra (alien morph) with Zdg Leku WIP (a few pages back), Sweet summer shirt again with a custom meme, Eastern Elegance pants with AElflaed's textures again. last is FWSA Krisandra (costume Mirialan skin maps) with Kylan hair, meme summer shirt again, and sweet summer skirt with costume colors. Also, some credit to EliteMasterLordofAll (YT channel) and Auralnauts (YT channel) for the cool tunes. Techno Union Anthem (YT vid) by RaKun and Michael Ortega.
eh, yeah. I had seen that site Prixat. The mesh is ok, it's also nice that it is UV mapped. I wish I could say more nice about it.
Oh, well, they did offer a download link that wasn't just a STL or max/3ds file, unlike so many others.
And once the download filter is added, there are only 9 models left,
and none of them are intact unlike so many that I've seen photos of.
it was a tad irritating when I was looking last year for a small fun render (or was it 2 years ago, lol. Time can be funny like that I guess, Isaac Arthur day vid). there were thousands of photos of hundreds of mint condition statues of exactly what I was looking for, yet the only 3D meshes I could find were of the 4 broken ones, lol. Maybe in time, the tech will get good enough that scanning these things won't be so difficult. And yeah, I was looking for both the sitting and standing ones. Oh, in fairness, that game consol I did get from there, so I had seen the site before and it's not all bad. there is some good stuff there and I do appreciate the efforts of the caretakers at the museums.
P.S. today's Isaac Arthur vid, may have a good explanation of how coffee is so powerful, lol.
k, I had put in for a few ships, tho there are plenty more to pitch in for if ye want to see it on Sam's wall over at Trekyards (YT vid),
Trekyards 'had' a what ships would you like to see live.The last Livestream was lots of fun with lots of fun chat about different Trek ships, and while I am not able to sponsor more, I do hope to be there in the chat for the fun. As hinted above in the former render, I do have another set of figures open on the other comp, so I hope to have some fun chat about them. in the meantime...
In other news, I guess having the 9900k outdo the top end HED part from intel wasn't that great for intel, and having the AMD consumer chip also trounce it in apps the 9900k didn't just didn't go over well. So there are rumors going around about some 10990xe thing (UFDtech YT vid). being rumors, some sound to be the same specs as a former Xeon as if it's somehow a re-refresh meme at this point, others sound like wishful thinking. The angle I'll take, is a wait for more concrete benchmarks and stick with what is on the market now for render boxes being used now. Not to say, as Steve and Gordon have said, some intel platforms are not doing so great compared to other options out now (GN YT vid). My 2 farthings, I would not be surprised if that 10990xe thing is a desperate attempt to sell x299 motherboards that apparently are taking up space in warehouses, tho, that is just speculation on my part.
ok, this may take a tad longer, as I don't have a 320+GigaFLOPS PC (minimum Half a TaraFLOPS recommended) to do spot renders on. This isn't the figure, as years ago I had determined it was something to do with the AoA shader mixed with HD sub-D mesh. I so want to drop a 3950x in that comp. Overall so far, I do feel 'neutral' about what I've seen so far with the Lekkulian, so far.
One good side to the AoA over Omni, I don't need to find every single map when moving it to the Daz default. So there is that. And Omni on HD Sub-D mesh isn't much better than AoA on HD Sub-D mesh anyway.
It's been a somewhat sideways weekend. Some things were great, some bad, and some meh. To start with, the wall of ships is moving along really well and my humble thanks to all that tossed some change into the coffee fund for ships there. I suspect Sam will be rendering ships for the next month.
Now for the more sobering thing. I had gotten a full-screen notice that updates were over for win7, thankfully Microsoft didn't cause me to lose what I was working on when that happened, the win10 update system still needs some work there. I noticed Joker Reviews had put out a vid on the situation, and before I had gotten moring coffee going, his channel was yanked. A serious 'WHAT!?" moment as I'm sure he didn't do any mistakes like showing a key or something. I later found out that his YT channel had been hijacked and shut down.
https://twitter.com/JokerReview/status/1217986071365066752
ok, rewriting 3 paragraphs, as this was bad, and it dragged on a bit. I'll let Joker explain what happened (YT vid), and TheQuartering did go over some of the tactics used (YT vid), and SomeOrdinaryGamers also covered it some (YT vid, ah, language advisory with that one), it looks bad. This distracted me to the point I didn't get stuff done I expected to have ready to post last weekend.
uh, yeah, I need to get the other renders off the other comp, I think the normal maps are a mistake of a sorts on the guy. Some normal maps can be ok in Iray, yet turn out to be way too 'strong' in 3delight, easy to fix as well. Just select the figure's skin zones, and change the normal maps to 'none'.
well, after some digging in folders, tabs, and settings, I think it is fair to start this off with a bit of "tempering expectations". The most important being that because of the hands and feet, and other fundamentals of how shaping dials work, combining this with other figures may very well end up with inside out features as I have fumbled across a lot in the past with other products (some also limited to 100% or off akin to the Lekkulian body shape)
).
As such, mixing at lower levels simply will result in odd-looking hands, and options of what you can mix in will be significantly limited at full strength for the three-finger hands. Also, the head tails are not an option, they are a must with the provided body dial, as the heads are a tad broken without the head-tail geografts.
So, what of the head tails, well, they look ok at first glance, however your stuck with the 3 skin tone options included as they do not have an alt torso map UVing option to let you use them with other figures maps.
Well, that is a hefty dose of tempered expectations, so what's left. Lekkulian G8F with body shape at 50% on the left (note the tiny 4th fingers), and 100% dialed in body Lekkulian G8M right. Outfits, sweet summer left, boys in the sun right (both with costume meme maps).
well, I can say at least the shaping dials don't break eye pose controls. The pose dials for the head tails do work, yet they do take some fiddling to get the tails to hang relaxed. And the skin maps look ok in 3DL (the 3DL mats are greatly appreciated, thanks
even with the limitations with kitbashing, the product as is, is ok. I do find it a tad disappointing the hands and feet were not a separate dial for the 3 finger morph, as that would have made the body dial better suited for mixing with other figures. And likewise, not having a separate head and body dial is a limitation. the head tails, well, they work, Abita with limitations and conditions. I like the idea, and the maps and shape are nice for use "as is" no modifying figure pair (and I'm super happy to have a guy and gall combo).
edit: oh, thats what I forgot to look at, tails on vanilla. I'll toss that togeather with morning coffee as I dig up stats on another 6GB '60' card.
loose ends as I sip my first cup of coffee for the day. so, Lekkulian with the body dialed out, is ok, so from there it is possible to use other figure shapes, as typed before that isn't mixing, that is simply substituting one body shape for something else. At least the border of the head tails geograft is ok with the body shape dialed out, so this could work like this.
, I don't think 12nm is that bad with yields. hence the curiosity of what is going on.
Also, looking at the shaping morphs for the head tails, there is some on G8F, and even dials for the left and right independent.
On the G8M one, there combined, so there is some shaping, their just symmetric in nature, unlike the G8F ones.
I'm not sure if that was to save effort on a possible limited return on investment thing, or if rawn just got too overzealous with the dial combining (like the combined head and body dials rawn 'loves' to do). it's not the first time that I asked if something will have a separate head and body dial only for the PA to say 'no'. Some minor things that me and rawn agree to disagree on, lol. Lekkulian does work as is, so as said, it's ok and isn't technically "broken". segway, ah, yeah. kind of like the RTX2060ko isn't quite an RTX2060super or RTX2060not-super.
I guess there is a slight difference between 'interest' and 'curiosity'. One implies a hint of liking or want (like my interest in the Lekkulian figures), the other is a bit more wanting to know how it affects the surroundings. The best I can describe the 2060ko is 'curiosity' as from an 8GB 1070non-ti for Iray point of view, 6GB is a bit of a downgrade. The particular attributes that Steve discovered (YT vid) is surprising considering how it relates to the 1660 and 2060 cards. If you have 'nothing', and need 'something' for blender and other 3D rendering stuff, then all options are on the table, there is that going for the 2060ko. however for gaming, it's meh, and if you already have a graphics card, then it gets a bit more meh. I still need to fill in the graphs I started making back in 2018 for including the confusing mess of 'super' cards, and this just reminded me that I should at least look at the state of things (old incomplete chart)
in short, as I have a 1070non-ti for Iray, most newer things in my budget range is at best a sidegrade or a downgrade with less 3D environment capacity. and from a 23watt passively-cooled 4GB GK208 HTPC angle, the 2060ko is a fan-noise watt hog for a juke-box/vid-player just like the AMD 5500XT. so it's meh I think. it's just curious why Nvidia would opt to lobotomize 1200usd or 800usd parts for a 300usd product
after some digging, I found some stats over at TechPowerup (web page).
not sure about the prices, tho it looks to be close enough for current trends rather than my usual launch MSRP thing. The 2060ko is an interesting combo, almost like the GTX1070 with 2 less gigs and a few less ROPs. Not everything is in the chart, and I did move stuff up to omit the non-Iray cards. I'll plug this into a few spreadsheets, as I don't have anything current yet on the $/gig and $/CUDA-cores lists. I am courius if the 2060ko's TDP is remotly closee to the 1070non-ti or not. After thinking about it a second, I should have done 6GB as orange, so that 4GB could be yellow and anything under 4GB as red, oh well, lol.
Very interesting few days.
"VMWare Burns AMD" from a HardwareUnboxed vid made me think of looking something up.
1,500 USD per four thread node. The first company that licenses 3Delight commercially, in early 2005, was Rising Sun Pictures. The licensing scheme was originally based on number of threads or cores. Since 2018, all purchased licenses are unlimited multi-core. (wiki link)
so, I hope for those lucky enough to enjoy 64 core Threadrippers (TechGage 3990x web), things should be ok. As for the 2060ko, meh. Think I hinted at it earlier and I'm sure GN-Steve mentioned it in the vid. if you are doing Pro stuff that is not Vram quantity limited then the 2060ko may be worth checking out, if you don't have a Titan or 2080ti already.
I'm still not sure where the 2060Ko should line in terms of performance in Iray, yet Iray is very Vram quantity limited, VDDR, GDDR or whatever you want to call it. I'm in a bit of a snob position, because for me going from 8GB on the 1070non-ti to 6GB would be a drastic downgrade, and even an 8GB to 8GB sidegrade just isn't worth eating ramen noodles for a year, lol. it doesn't matter if the 2060ko can be faster in Iray, if your scene just won't run on it at all, lol. I find the 6GB cards as of now, are just in that middle ground of too hot to big and noisy for many uses and just lacking capability for the others. Kind of like the latest era of crummy ship CGI.
*Fun Factoid; it looks like it cost between 88 million to 99 million dollars to make the 11 episodes of the Star Trek Picard show. A SpaceX launch at about 57 million dollars each, literally costs less and they get better video quality.
Trekyards did look at the Romulan "Stealth Enantiornithes" (youtube link), cool-looking ship, if only the CGI wasn't junk. There are a few other screenshots of the ship, however there covered up by force field effects and other bloom things. It kind of reminds me of some major misconceptions about fanservice.
"fan service" of late : the act of insulting "longterm repeat customers" for knowing more about a franchise than the studio producing it.
"subverting expectations" : having a low expectation for something while hoping for better, only for the result to be far worse than could be previously fathomed, lol.
After episode 2 of Star Trek Picard, I am now wondering if Starfleet, that SciFi entity that used to be the shining example of striving for the best Sentient-altruism you could be, is now guilty of potential War Crimes (ICRC rue55, "The denial of humanitarian assistance"). The basic starting of the show, Picard quit Starfleet because the entire fleet was ordered to Not render humanitarian aid to the Romulans, I find just about everything about that just wrong for Star Trek. I figured it was he just retired for a happy ever after as the beginning plot before seeing the show, so much for happy ever afters, lol. The only thing missing was the shot of Picard drinking a vat of grape pulp as it dripped down his chin, lol.
so, interesting few days to say the least. Oh, new cute elves. Left SublimelyVexed Aerwyn and middle is Jassii Billie. Aerwyn's mats appear to apply the face bump map to the torso zone (kind of easy to fix), ...
and the body shape dial makes the eyes do the break pose control rotation (esp at the 50% shape position), hmmm. Jassii Billie, really really nice.
(edit, 19feb2020, many weeks later. I did finally get around to letting 3DS know about the eyes and bump map mistakes, they are looking into it)
Yesterday something filtered through the Daz Store that caught my eye, ok, a few things however first I will look at this as I don't have the HDDs plugged in with Pluto and Mercury data. That looks like a fantastic backdrop for Ship-Por-rrr-(uh can I type that here), in any case, the Promos look good for them. On to a project that's been lingering for some time, and maybe a new set in the Daz Stor may be able to augment some of the stuff in my CC0 Zdg Gym set that I spent as much time confusing my pore little mind with FIG documents as I did try(ing, why Grammarly?) to make the mesh do what I needed it to do. So, starting out with looking at the poses in the Z Competition Gymnastics set.
Overall this does look promising. The first thing I noticed was proper padded endcaps on the balance beam (not rendered yet) with what looked to be proper FIG shaped beam profile (cross-section) in the promos.
The poses are a nice add-in, much appreciated. I will note that the FIG docs were very confusing with the hights given from the top of the mats instead of the top of the podium for the balance beam apparatus. So I can forgive Zeddicuss for what looks to be a height discrepancy with the balance beam poses. I only made that beam 4 times from scratch before figuring things out on the 5th try, lol. Also guessing from the poses, the beam in the Zeddicuss Competition set may be low on the altitude side.
Altho it looks like some of the poses were just view-field limb dragged to locations causing the toes to contort in odd ways that result in needing to do a lot of tinkering with some of the poses. More than the usual positioning the figure on the apparatus.
As for what I've looked at so far, The poses again mostly look ok. The uneven bars look a tad off for the height, however that has changed over the years, so I'll give Zeddicuss that much. I don't know for sure yet if the 2016 document I have is corect any more, I haven't looked in a very long time. I don't know for sure yet if the 2016 document I have is correct anymore, I haven't looked in a very long time.
The surface zoning and overall detailing of the Apparatus do look fantastic. not quite a perfect 10, or whatever they call it now, lol, it is very good looking even outside of Iray, confusing technical dimensions aside (The PDFs are indeed very confusing, genuinely so for some of the stuff).
Overall what I looked at so far does 'look' incredibly good, and I will Thank Zeddicuss for not tossing in the pile of old wooden soda pop crates as a Vaulting hazard to Athletes, lol. I have a Free CC0 model of the 'tong' over yonder (OBJ Link in this post, top of page 46 this thread, Daz Content ver here at DropBox) to help fill in the set. Oh, and a monumental thanks Zeddicuss for the morphing mats in his Gym set, including wrinkles. Drastically better than the former attempt a few years back that had me asking if the PA bothered to try using it first, lol.
I never finished my Uneven bars, for two reasons. One as ye can see in the screencap, it was incredibly complex with multiple parts that would need the mesh remade from scratch due to my novice attempts. The second being a lack of ambition or urgency out of just not wanting to step on PA's toes. I may never finish that thing I started tinkering with eons ago.
Besides, the one Zeddicuss made looks really good and doesn't look to be that far off from FIG overall size.
Oh, FYI, textures used on my set are the AElflaeds cloth, and the Leo is Leotard for G3F Auto Flopped onto G8F, background is Top Of The World. And it looks like there may be a 2019 "Apparatus Norms" document, Hmmm, annnnd it apears the PDF link on the page is busticated, oh well. .. maybe this PDF link works.
Ok, after digging up the current 2019 FIG Apparatus Norms, I guess I still managed to get the height off, opps. lol.
big cube is 125cm tall and wide, long thin one is 500cm long. My beam is a tad too tall.
I can forgive the lack of padding on the smaller beams legs, despite it being a rule for competition apparatus, I seldom see the leg padded covers used in training gyms. size aside, that looks damn good Zeddicuss.
as I sat down with morning coffee, I sort of got slammed with 2 things, and not exactly bad things. Also, some renders I had going as I slept finished, it is so nice when win10 updates don't reboot the PC mid render before I save them (yanked the cat5 cable, ye is permanently grounded, lol). Oh, and Anna Benjamin Mada or someone at the ZenDesk has fixed the Gothic outfit necklace, the Pendant now loads with the necklace load DUF. thanks thanks thanks.
And the surface presets appear to work for that as well. (bread crumb. I find it easiest to set up mats, by using the surface zone selection tool rather than the "Universal" one. If you try to click hair, for example, the "Universal tool" will select the figure's head rather than the hair, great for posing, meh for setting hair colors.)
Over all, looks good. I still need to look into them Aerwyn (Renderosity) eyes, guilty of dragging my feet on that one. it's a far more complex fix I think, than just loading up an item and saving a Daz Studio Asset or whatever it is for a wearable item. I dread just thinking about it, maybe, if I can find the DSF/DSZ/DS-whatever file and open it in notepad++, maybe I can find the offending lines and fix it that way, instead of the ERC-freeze tedium, assuming it's not encrypted, eeek. Renderosity isn't exactly clear about if things got updates, zip named "Aerwyn UD 11 26 18...", Guessing that's 26NOV2018, I will assume the zips haven't been updated yet, hmmm. in any case, I'm rambling out loud, lol. My brother sent me a link to a WTX case that caught his eye, an EVGA thing that may fit the T-rex-40 Threadripper boards (EATX, or XL-ATX).
And in passing, it looks ok. From the pics, I can see what looks like good vents for a few Tesla compute cards, with enough PCI slots in the case to drop a Tesla in the T-rex-40's 8th slot. I don't think GN Steve has looked at the case yet, tho I think it looks promising for a Desk-side-Compute box, assuming the fans or build quality isn't junk (stuff I can't tell by looking at pics). Speaking of Render Boxes, I got distracted when I was looking for a skybox to use with the gym set, when I noticed the Alvin Bemar Pluto&Charon thing in the Smart Tab.
Top left is the Explorer class (B5) from ShareCG, top middle is the incomplete Bilskirnir that I was working on, and the Vanishing Point Orville right (that one is a Sweet ship and model). Lower left is one of the billion busticated K't'inga models I came across, no clue where it came from. I appreciate the effort 'someone' had gone threw giving me a version of a D7 and K't'inga, however, that K't'inga was just the D7 with texture maps, and it also had some problems with hovering in mid-air decals. Distractions aside, Pluto and Charon, damn that looks good, even for a "Med Resolution" module (as named in the scene tab). I don't expect to be doing animated low altitude flyovers any time soon, so 'med' is good enough.
*I added a light to the camera location for the shot of Charon, to make it easier to see in that shot. Oh, and the ships are obviously not to scale, it's more interesting than infinitesimal specs that most would never notice.
I can also understand completely the complete lack of high res detail of most of the two planets, and I am really grateful actual data was used instead of faking it with a texture brush with completely fictional features. I can also understand others wanting the rest filled in, and I wouldn't be against that so long as it at least matches the low-res data we do have for them. As is, yeah, I'm super thrilled to have a 3D model I can look at from any angle. FYI, the full Pluto scene (excluding the ships I added) only eats about 647MB ish, so rendering with it on non-workstations should be easy enough. As for Mercury, well, I'll say in advance of me pulling it through DIM onto the render box, that I don't expect to be able to get up close on the ground and personal with Caloris Planitia like I want to, I still expect that one to be very nice for more distant ship fly-by renders.
Oh, I haven't forgotten about the Gym set, I just got distracted, and was deciding if I should confuse things by including assets I'm not thrilled about from other sets. There is an ok looking set of rings in another set, the surface zoning makes it useless outside of Iray with the provided Presets, so meh. I think I'll leave that spot empty on the podium for now. I've yet to do any render of, yet from what I've seen, Zeddicuss did a nice job on the Pommel Horse, looks incredible in spot renders.
*1, I'm calling them Planets as I have always called them that, and it's shorter than the new 'technical' name. A "dwarf double planet", is still a "Planet". That and after seeing the geological features on Pluto and Charon, I think few outsides of astrology would argue with calling them Planets. There are volcanic features, active glacier regions, and massive mountain ranges, in my book, that is way more than just a rock in space. The rest are technicalities that I would argue also kicks Earth out of "The Planet Club", lol.
*2, Ship scales, yeah, their way way way off due to me just wanting to toss together a scene to show the Planets. The Explorer ship should be 5 miles long and change (yes, as long as the Babylon 5 station), about 8046 ish meters. The Orville should be about 2000 meters long. The Asgard Bilskirnir should be, uh, one source stated 1400 meters, another states 1600 meters, and to confuse matters ...
there are actually 2 completely different Bilskirnir ships shown the first season it was shown in, so anyone's guess as to the version I was working on. "This is getting out of hand! Now, there are two of them", lol. Charon is about 606,000 meters across, Pluto is about 2,370,000 meters across, with about 19,640,000 meters between them. To scale, the ships would be invisible specs.
I'm so far behind on stuff. I need to sit down with a drink and a snack and binge-watch Buildzoids vids as I'm a month behind there, the DDR4 memory Rambling thing and the Ryzen3000 on Gigabyte vid (for 3900x and 3950x) looks really interesting. Juan (blancolirio) is doing ok and the 737 wire thing is kind of interesting (YT vid). Scott Manely has an interesting YT vid about some almost steam-punk like mechanical rover for Venus competition thing. GN looked into the chewing gum on the 2060ko memory, that was a cool set of tests (no chewing gum was baked to death during the making of that YT vid). And the UFDtech crew is mostly in the US with Bret's son now, things look to be going ok for them (that was a fun vid).
So, I still have mixed feelings about a 6GB card for Iray, I guess the 2060ko is ok for Blender Cycles that isn't Vram limited. Off to fuss with cool gym sets, and binge-watch some AHOC vids. P.S. thanks so much for listening to the fans (longterm repeat customers) Sonic crew.
Congrats GoG for the fatherhood achievement (doing well vid).
The above is for guestimating without actual testing of the thing. akin to my horsepower thing. HP = IPC per thread x clock x number of Threads.
Hmm, who would have thought clock of the ALU&FPU times the number of operations per-clock for all the Math-Units could possibly hint at something, nope, RPM doesn't mean jack when comparing 4 cylinders 6 cylinder or 64 cylinder engines with different cylinder displacements. "you just can't compare different architectures", sure, lol. Maybe Wendell over at L1tech (3990x un-testable YT vid) hints that just maybe clocks do mater for more cores when talking CPU gigaFLOPS (wiki) or the more dated MIPS, maybe. The Threadripper 3990x Microcenter build vid Wendell alludes to is here, hour-long and 16min vid ugh... ok, benchmarks start at about 11minutes 30seconds, so not that bad.
March 2, 2017, Zen turned out to not be yet another APU thing leaving Piledriver and Sandy Bridge to linger on as the high-performance CPU, signaling the end of the 10 years of just 200MHz more on 8-thread CPUs.
I really want to get a 32-thread 3950x for the GN R7, yet I'm not sure even the 128-thread 3990x Threadripper will come close to that 320 gigaFLOPS number (Just to get AoA subsurface scatter on HD mesh to take less than 5 minutes to compute). The other angle of 'optimization' that Wendell was talking about is not in CPU logic IPC improvements, but in how the software reduces wasted cycles doing redundant stuff. AoA subsurface is really bad, and something in the HD mesh code just compounds that to stupid levels of the FPUs spinning their virtual wheels accomplishing nothing fast.
(ZDG rant detected)
Maybe in time, the likes of Adobe and the makers of Marvelous Designer and Z-brush will consider the 'FREE' courses offered by NPACI and the University of Tennessee on writing code and optimizing code for "Parallel computers" that was posted way back in 2002, for use on systems that have been the norm on consumer computers for the past 3 years now. The 9900k is an 8 core 16 thread consumer part, and the R9-3950x is a 16 core 32 thread CPU on AMDs consumer platform, there is no excuse for clinging to the old 1980's single thread single core code for apps made today, especially apps that are not hampered by the Graphics driver draw call thread.
I don't care what you 'think' the limit is for your Photo processing or 3D manipulation code, I guarantee you there are already scientists and supercomputer programmers around that already figured out a solution to your code difficulties with MPP systems (Massive Parallel Processing), and are eager to share how they figured out the solution. Google search is your friend in such situations, Please join the rest of the computing world in 2020 instead of staying back in the stone ages of 1991 with your CRAY-2.
sorry, I grow tired of waiting on apps that spin their wheels on a single thread while the rest of the computer twiddles it's virtual thumbs idling, cuz the app wasn't written to be multithreaded.
Maybe someday loading textures won't be limited to a single thread. as for AoA, having everything else from caustics to reflections to illumination angles take less time to compute than just subsurface scatter on HD mesh is just stupid. here is a random thought, ditch that busticated atomic-level "Solar Photon Random Walk" SSS code and replace it with a simple gaussian blur,
it's a thought. A gaussian blur has got to be a billion times less compute-intensive than whatever the hell AoA is doing on HD mesh, or OmniUber for that matter, they're both horrible on HD mesh.
To somewhat end this on a funny note, Google was pestering me to look at the new TOS all day yesterday. I saved what I thought was the PDF to look at with morning coffee, needless to say, there was no "brain melting out my ear in a desperate attempt to flee from what I'm trying to do to it" while reading legalize this morning.
Fun week, fun week. spent most of it vegetating to YT vids, and putzing around in GIMP trying and failing to get a skin tone color masked onto diffuse maps.
left was Peppermint (G2F) with Alfred's Finery outfit and Kung Fu Hair, right is the not quite anything close Gen6 Aiyana migrated to G8F fumbling ERC-freeze/Transfer-utility attempt ump-teen-million. The Rowana Hair did work out rather well with the TJ8 ears, and the Goth outfit is looking rather nice. The converted figure needs a hell of a lot more work, ugh.
So, other things going on, hmmm. well, intel finally reduced prices on the xeons, not so much the old ones, just the old Haswell and sandy bridge xeons rebranded with a lower MSRP. At least the mythic 28 core unicorn, water chiller not included, is no longer out in the ort cloud of 15 thousand dollars (2018 GN flashback vid). it also is a bit meh compared to what is on the market today, hamstrung by 14nm stagnation and wafer supply limitations aside, along with debatable 10nm viability if you consider the single laptop part floating around somewhere
I look at this chart, yes, TechGage did some more C4D testing (website link), well. That 16 core low-end-socket consumer part verses the 18 core High-End-Desktop part, and I seriously am starting to doubt if that 28 core unicorn has a chance against even a lowly 24 core Threadripper 3960x. And that is not even considering the 32 core, 64 core, and 128 core EPYC options. it's not just intel that needs to get off rebranding antique Haswell/sandy bridge architectures with minor microcode rehashes.
Ask has a monopoly, and it's detrimental to anything beyond single die 7700k CPUs. Apparently, Asetek has a new pump out that has an even smaller microfine area, and that's just not cool (GamersNexus YT vid). Ok, my chicken scratches are not the best before coffee, I know there is no 8780xe CPU, yet there is an 8700k, that's how confusing the intel part numbers are these days, lol. In any case, Most people are not into dellidding their multi-thousand dollar CPUs, let alone gutting brand new CLCs for the fun of it. so they won't know where the CPU die is under the CPUs IHS, let alone what orientation the micro fins are in the round CLC block that can be mounted in just about any orientation arbitrarily on the CPU. They will slap on the bracket, mount it to the motherboard, and rotate the pump cover to be upright if they even care to adjust the logo cover thing. On larger chips like the 7980xe line or multi chiplet Ryzens, most of the chip extremities will be beyond the 29.5mm x 21.4mm micro fin area due to the new pump's fin area being smaller than the dies.
TR will be even worse with the IO die being directly cooled and the CPU core chiplets off in the corners to fend for themselves for whatever scraps of cold plate they can get. Oh, and it gets better, lol. the Enermax Threadripper/xeon CLC apparently has some coolant aging issues (GamersNexus YT vid), hmmmm.
Props to TechPowerup for the nice photo of that cooler, if only there was a TR/EPYC version and it was available during the Zen2 launch. GN also just put out a Yeston Cute Case YT vid, looks super nice if you like the Cute Pet or Wife GPU cards from them. Oh, and a sober note, Freeman Dyson's achievements shall not be forgotten, RIP great one (SFIA YT vid).
Edit.
I had no clue this was in the works, the above and former months of ripping out my hair with the transfer utility was not related to RiverSoft's new Gen6 to Gen8 thing. I have had ok luck with the Gen7 to Gen8 thing with Paloma, Dewi, Akimisu, and a few others. So maybe there is a chance the crosseyed wrong eye location or jaw poking through the chin can be worked around. the not round pupils, that may require Z-brush to fix for some. I need to run to the store to get some coffee additive, so I've yet to even read the Gen6-to-gen8 thing description yet.
The skin maps, that's a sticky issue due to not having a mask to separate out the hand palms, I'll need to get the 3D paint things (blacksmith 3d) and just make the maps from scratch. coffee first, then I'll just plant my head on the desk and sob on the keyboard in dismay, lol.
Just when I thought I could start scribbling on screencaps, and having some fun trying to make a fun render, nope.
Just like Cooler testing madness (GN YT vid), there are so many things this could be from the hair to the figure shape combo, to something glitching during the conversion process, to just windows10 being windows10. lol.
Looks like I need to go back, and just try the conversion, yet again, ugh. This may take a smidgen longer than I had hoped. Things were sort of going smooth until this morning with the exception of forgetting a step or few from RiverSoft's vid (RiverSoftArt YT vid on Character Converter).
Time for some coffee. at least, I have a lot to scribble on and try to condense into a coherent post. Lots of fun. Oh, congrats to Isaac Arthur for the Space Pioneer Award (NSS webpage).
Edit,
ok, looks like it may be something with that hair specifically, I just scrapped all the gogo dsf files, converted it again, and still did it, then tried Eve and got the same result with that hair. tried another on-shoulder hairstyle, no probs. hmmm. FYI, both styles are by the same PA, so I don't think it's a difference in workflow between them, don't think. Happenstance appears to be ok, no clue whats going on with Innocent Hair. I do recall Happenstance can be slow to complete rendering with some lights, tho not as bad as some other styles I've endured.
Note to self, make sure gen8 doesn't already have a figure named what your converting. In my haste to look at the bone opacity anomaly and converting FWSA Phoebe for a quick test, I had fogoten that Raziel-Jessaii Phoebe existed on gen8.
so it looks like 'zero figure' sets them dials to zero, and the script converts that setting over to the gen8 dial. it apparently isn't saved, cuz clearing the scene is all it takes for the bone opacity dials to go back to normal. so I'm not sure if the 'zero figure' was a good choice for doing zero shape and zero pose faster now.
ok, after many cups of coffee, having a small chat with RiverSoft about some 'glitches' and considering how the script does not save the mistaken conversions for some reason, I have decided to stick with mu original thought of "zero out EVERYTHING" between conversions of figure sections.
again, bone opacity apparently isn't saved, cuz clearing the scene is all it takes for the bone opacity dials to go back to normal.
Right is the original GoGo for Mei Lin6 (Mei Lin swapped out with Aiko6 and Aiko8 respectively) wearing After School 2 with Discipline for After School 2 textures (I attempted to d-force the skirt, that went kind of eh), and The Jogger sneakers. Left is Gogo converted to gen8 using that Gen6-to-gen8 script, wearing the Pearl outfit from FWSA Mable auto flopped on Gen8 with the shinies shaders, Frolic stockings, and cool Amazing Morphing Boots.
I will admit my attempt of mimicking Gogo's makeup in Gimp using CS Grace's maps wasn't the best given my chicken scratches skills, lol.
so, maps aside, I find it best to convert just the head dial, then zero EVERYTHING out and then convert the body. because often a head or body shape will use another dial, and the script ends up lumping that in with the control dial for the full figure rather than just the head or body, if its all converted at once. I also find it best to do the ear separately as well for elves/fae, with the understanding it will need some work in hexagon.
Left is the original FW Eve, right is the conversion using ADSI Sewa's maps. Not quite as similar to Eve's freckles I will admit, maybe some other maps would do better like Madeline or Autumn, maybe.
I kind of expected the ears to fail the instant I had seen just how defined the point was on them for FW Eve.
I could probably smooth that over in hex with an hour or so of poking at mesh points. Some time ago I had attempted the transfer utility thing to migrate the ear shape I had made from G3F over to G3M, and even that needed major work on effectively identical mesh, so I'm not surprised at all with elf ears transferring rather poorly. The rest of the conversion went really well I think.
So in closing as I look for a cool outfit combo for DES Cassia. Watch RiverSoft's YT vid a couple of times, make backups of and be prepared to delete the converted DSF files and try a couple of times before running with a converted character for scenes and stuff.
ok, pushing this ahead with a teaser as I'm still scribbling on notes and screencaps for the other stuff. still alive, the past few weeks have been shall we say interesting. (shirt texture altered to make the paw print more visible)
after poking and prodding at larger than ATX cases, lol.
That is Tigerlily converted to gen8 using that nifty gen6 to gen8 shape converter thing with FWSA Paloma's maps. I did eventually change the maps earlier this week to something else that I'm still scribbling notes for. Overall not that bad I think. in the meantime, going back to 2018 when I started looking at designing a new workstation case for the first time since I made the one I have now back in 2004
I think this GamersNexus vid (YouTube vid "E-ATX" Is A Lie: How Motherboard Makers Ruined Form Factors) was partly my fault
And exasperated by the XL-ATX vs E-ATX threadriper3000 boards last year.
I had no idea just how messed up things were, I thought EEB or E-ATX was and always was the same thing, 12x13 inches. Apparently, E-ATX is like looking for a case that has top-mounted radiator support. Just because it sais a 240mm rad will fit, does not imply you can put a motherboard in there with the radiator, lol.
A motherboard can be shorter than 13 inches, just like the motherboard maker can opt to not use ALL of the available mounting hole locations, the case, however, MUST have all of it or it is not EEB/E-ATX (GN web page article), just like not all WTX motherboards are exactly 16.75 inches long despite the case spect being 14 × 16.75 in (356 × 425 mm) with 9 PCI slots.
edit: After I ranted a tad bit on a random YT vid, I decided to take a look and I guess they did eventually decide to look at something other than ice and CO2 deposits (sometime after 2009 when I had to walk away to avoid saying what I was thinking).
a nice concentration of one area of Vales Marineris and one volcano. I'll guess the data is still sitting on MRO or hasn't been published yet, at least they looked. MESSENGER's formal data collection mission began on April 4, 2011. The primary mission was completed on March 17, 2012 (got cool data for "all the things" including the weird terrain)...
the past few weeks things had gotten a tad delirious regarding the feelings of ink on a piece of paper or the physical wellbeing of ones and zeros inside of graphics card screen buffers.
A level of insanity (Patreon and other stuff ban YT vid) that had me questioning if I should bother continuing the gen6 to gen8 conversion tinkering I was doing.
Thankfully, I already purchased Aiko8, so PayPal can't block that purchase, lol. I wasn't that interested in what was blocked (Projekt Melody, not to be confused with Melody Project), yet the context did give me some doubts about other similar ethnic styled art, as even a Vocaloid is apparently 'bad' (Miku Amazon ban yt vid). At the end of the day, a pixel on a screen is not going to be harmed by someone looking at it, and 3D-mesh data won't be offended by someone thinking it looks nice without an Artificial Intelligence connected to it. none of it is real, it's just art.
So, I thought I had the outfit from one of Cassia's promos, however, after scrolling through the smart tab and some blind guessing on the product page, I decided to just go with one of the many other great elf-Kini style things I have.
I tried one item, and had some random some times and sometimes not poke-through where the gen6 outfit sometimes refused to follow the gen8 mesh after autofitting then saving the scene. it was very odd and I wasn't able to figure out exactly what it was that caused it to be fine immediately after autofitting the outfit however loading the saved scene, later on, had the outfit inside the figure. it was almost like the outfit-autofit relied on a figure fit morph/shape-projection that wasn't saved, causing the thing to end up inside the figure when loading the saved scene.
So, left is Cassia gen6 on Olympia6, right is the converted shape on gen8 with Olympia8 using a slight adjustment of Paloma's (gen7) maps. That nifty shape converter thing really is working rather nice I think.
overall that went really well, and I have yet to have any of that autofit save oddities with the Loissandra Kini, Elvan Fantasy did have some issues with some figures sometimes. And to be clear, the probs are NOT on gen6 with the gen6 outfits, it's only when autofitting 'some' of them to gen8 'sometimes' after saving and then, later on, loading the saved scene.
Edit, oh, it is/was Apr1st, well, sorry I wasn't joking, perhaps Gray can offer a tad bit of fun to the day with Satan's Pit Crew (YT vid).
Remember, their just ones and zeros in a video-game, with some whacked out funny plots, lol.
sorry for the far too long delay. I'm still around and kicking, probably to the dismay of motherboard VRM fashion accessory artisans, lol. I won't call then engineers because they seemingly do the exact opposite of designing a cooler that cools, and instead, appear to do everything possible to prevent it from cooling efficiently. ("Smash that dislike button" - Simon Whistler) lol.
No, rolling up a shirt like that is ill-advised, it is rather stifling, hence the expression of wanting the camera to focus already, lol. Needless to say, after taking that meme pic, I think I know how VRM's feel that are stifled by an IO cover. So much has been going on that no sooner do I start to write up the text for a post, something else happens.
GN has done a few really good looks at stuff that I have yet to sort into a cool chart or anything (10 years of intel vid). then that life thing just keeps happening, lol. as for the M.2 chip failure, I'll guess that a one-off defect caused an air bubble to be in the ceramic covering for the chip that eventually thermal expanded and cracked the thing. it was only an OS drive and never got that hot.
I was working on some screencaps for what was supposed to be this post, then the boot drive had a rather one-off failure. and after starting to sort that out, other things just kept happening. So, apparently, GIMP has changed the interface a lot, so my mistake of not getting some screencaps of what I did to make the paw print more pronounced on one thing, and the darker overlay stuff on another set of maps, got compounded by not having a clue where stuff got moved around to.
And that life thing, well, I'm still learning GIMP all over again, and then another thing happened that involved a lot of testing. When I was working on render time tests, I noticed that I didn't need to increase the 'Buckets' setting for more cores to be used. I don't know when that happened, tho thanks for making that thread thing a non-issue for high core count CPUs.
on that thought, in passing I was watching BZ ramble about memory (YT channel link) as I was working on other things and noticed there apparently is now a 64GB (2x32GB) kit floating around that BZ showed in that vid. it would be so nice to toss 128GB into rendering boxes, I'm just not sure how the bank or rank setup is on them 32GB DIMMs or how many banks/ranks Ryzen can address.
so that caught my eye, ditching the RGB tops for pin-fin coolers would also be really nice. Another thing given the spats of late about zen3 may or may not it's a developing story (GN vid link), a motherboard with no chipset fan would be very nice for whatever 16core zen3 happens to be, if or if not they have more I don't know, I'm simply speculating it will be 16 cores at the top end. I will guess a B550 board will be incredibly meh for a 3950x or whatever.
Oh, and yes, being retired NAVY, I had to snag that "harbor boxed" shirt before the sale was over (a joke inspired by how many times youtube mangles "hardware unboxed" in the CC text). The motherboard in that pic, it 'Looks' like a lump of metal that was smooth-bore drilled out to fit a fan, cuz somebody probably couldn't figure out how to make cooling fins in whatever CAD app they were using, lol. ok, enough joking and jabbing at silly designs. I have a mountain of stuff to scribble on and make comments for. be cool y'all.
... then 10900k launches, ugh (GN ten-nine-hundou vid), (Hardware Unboxed 10900k vid), (KitGuruTech Leo's 10900k vid). me thinks, i9-7900X (10core x299 CPU) with a lapped die and half the memory channels, hmmm. 14nm, same-lake cores, same iGPU, etc etc etc. lapped die and a thicker IHS, eh, some cooling there, x299 has a larger IHS heatsink mating surface, meh, eh.
it trades blows with the hundred dollars cheaper R9-3900x, and AM4 boards are 'mostly' cheaper than z490, hmmm. in games, the 9900k and 8700k are not far off. and even the i5-10600k (GN ten-six-hundou vid) sais hello every now and then, if the cost of the motherboard makes such a CPU worth it at all for an old 8700k-rebranding (KitGuruTech Leo's 10600k vid). to add insult to injury, the 10600k lacks velocity boost and turbo boost 3.0 (Hardware Canucks, eber's 10th gen vid), so it ends up flatlining as the 8700k just walks away with games and 1 thread apps. Oh and very interesting, 'only' the 'k' SKUs get that thinner die treatment, the rest are even closer to 9th gen I guess (in thermals and/or clocks).
It's just so difficult to say yay or nay when the progress looks something like that of late. Especially for apps like adobe that are so shackled by not being multi-threaded well.
short still here. looks like SpaceX is set to retry May30th at 3:22pm EDT. Maybe they can fix the lack of MCC audio on the MCC audio feed for then, I can hope anyway. I find the reporters incessant babbling over top of what was herd from MCC incredibly meh on the other feed. (EDIT, second launch attempt did go well, and audio was good on both feeds, thanks)
in other news, I did bring the 3950x up to 3.8GHz all core, just as the days started getting warm here.
So I am tempted to bring that backdown, at least it looks to be stable and not kick out blast furnace heat with Performance Inferno mode enabled. I've just been hesitant to bother doing extensive 3delight testing vs the 1700non-x, as it appears everyone has a different idea what the 3950x 'should' be running at stock, and rather belligerent if you want to run the CPU not overclocked.
I will guess some don't understand why I am so squeamish about the VRM running near 81c with Performance Inferno mode enabled, as they do not know what is on that VRM now, lol.
it's a blistering 89F right now, as soon as it cools off some, I will look at gimp some more and try to finish a G2F to G8F conversion post I started 2 months ago before things went sideways. Oh, and...
Hmm, I do know that the normal experience loves to cram CUDA/Iray twitchy drivers down the cat5 cable, I can only hope Quadro Experience is slightly better for non-gamers.
So, where was I many cups of coffee ago when things went sideways?
Oh yeah, GN had gotten a T-Rex-40 Threadripper 3990x to run some tests on. They were on their way to Aisa for some factory tours, so I don't think they had time to do anything other than the YT vid on it with a couple of blender tests and v-ray. damn, that is close to the two Tesla V100 cards, 3990x is a beast, lol.
Glad to see adobe is still in the dark ages of 486 code where only absolute GHz matters, it just sucks if ye does ANYTHING else with the PC that can comprehend more than 1 thread. I would almost be willing to bet GN Steve, that if they LN2 overclocked a 7700k up to 5.3GHz, it would outperform that 9900k at 5.2GHz in Adobe Photoshop CC 2019 Benchmark, lol. In any case, Tech gauge also has a few good Arnold run tests as well as many other things (text webpage). Oh, GN did pass the 3990x threw a MonkeyHead Blender tests, much appreciated. so, on to that Tigerlily g8f conversion I started to teas way back.
(it will take some time to collect all the product links). Left to right. Original Gen6 TigerLily (don't remember if Lily was needed for the shape or not), Bloomingwood hair, EJ Wind Earrings, JG Skirt, and Elvan fantasy. I do remember being pleasantly surprised I didn't need to adjust the skirt any to fit over the elvan fantasy. The middle is the Gen6-to-Gen8 shape conversion of Tigerlily (with modified Brisen maps, and Mika8 substituted for Giselle-6 shape, Mika8 ears as well), Xylia Hair, Bali Earrings and bracelets, Catgirl Megapack top with adjusted maps, SYLM panty and Loincloth 03. On the right is DES Brisen, Xylia Hair, Sweet Summer top and skirt, NC Chain, Sparkle earrings, and I burrowed Zev0's Molly's highly adjustable eyebrows for both Brisen and the Gen8 Tigerlily conversion (as I tend to like kitbashing shapes a lot). Why was I thinking the list would be short, lol. I first was looking at the shirt and was trying to get that pawprint to stand out more than being practically invisible, when I noticed some other maps in the folder that looked oddly like the original Gen6 Tigerlily stripes.
Hmmm, sort of like makeup that should be easy to convert to grayscale and overlay on the figures maps. I ended up going with DES Brison for this one, FWSA Paloma also would have worked with some minor color adjustments.
I wasn't quite happy with how pale the stripes turned out, and it needed much more tinkering. fast forward to a few months later, new SSD, and a new ver of GIMP to learn where they moved all the things to, lol.
Mostly the same as above, except on Brisen far right, I swapped out the Sweet Summer skirt and shirt, for gen6 Elvan fantasy autofitted with lower metal off, and SYLM Loincloth 01. I forced d-force on that loincloth and had to help it out some with a D-former, I should have left good enough alone with that one as d-force wasn't too cooperative. SY did well with that set. As for the Catgirl Megapack set shirt, I've yet to play with most of the stuff in that set, the shirt just caught my eye when I was looking for an outfit for Tigerlily. I'm not really sure whether I fussed with the levels contrast or brightness curve for the shirt texture, that was so many cups of coffee ago. It can use more fussing with, however good enough as is. The skin stripe maps, now that is a really cool discovery I did not expect to find.
I initially thought about fussing with the brightness curve of the stripe map, however, that some times makes edges a tad extreme, so I decided to just keep piling up more darken stripe-mask layers till it was dark enough. I'm kind of happy with that result now.
so this was an interesting gaff. The board maker had sent the Overclocker a special explicitly for OCing designed and build bord with a Bios apparently heavily modified from the Aqua with the Aqua board name left in it. Then the started saying the board publicly available to the public had achieved the world OC records, despite it not having the same memory layout, and I highly doubt it includes the specially crafted LN2 OC Bios. In part 2 Youtube vid, buildzoid did have some good chats about memory layouts, not as extensive as the other vid he did that also covered differences between 'T' and daisy-chain topologies, yet still very good. (brb, need to restart the PC after the 24 hour live, why does YouTube live streams eat so much memory, ugh)
Glad the SpaceX launch went ok, hope Dougles's forehead is ok, being on the tall side my self I know how easy it is to encounter door frames and hatch frames.
And thanks to the commentators that let us hear what mission control was saying, much appreciated.
Been a busy few weeks, and I'm late with this one.
So, foreground left is Daisy8, wearing the Versitial Dress surface zoned into a skirt, and the Party Monster outfit tube top using the Versatile dress included shader presets. Right is SASE Jazz (without Sahira8, 25% Daisy8 instead, and Daisy8 ears), Whatever the hell "DW outfit" is ("dForce Wardrobe & Shaders 1 for Genesis 8 Female", that's a mouthful, no wonder it's just called 'DW' everywhere else, lol.), with GIMP made maps from the included set for the not included 3DL I baked up, The skirt looks good. Maybe someday I'll make and save some presets for 3DL, eh, good enough for now. At least Jazz's maps were much easier with a drop in 3DL shader and use, I will confirm despite showing up when explicitly searching for "3delight" there are no presets for 3DL with Jazz, the maps do work tho. Oh, four seasons Fay wings parented via a 'null', and fussed with shader settings for the hell of it. I'll also point out 'Blue' in the background (Violetta by Anagord, Renderosity), I use them Versatile dress shaders on her outfit as well. Overall, most of the stuff was rather painless, with some tinkering on a few things that the mislabeled keyboard didn't help much with.
in the realm of new things and this talk of the gong from 7nm to 5nm and beyond, I think some forget that the names are just names are not the actual feature size. for quite a few years now node shrink numbers have been implied performance gains independent of actual dot pitch per-say. While it is very true that the wavelength of an electron is around 10nm actual size, the Direct tunneling limit of Silicon happens around 3nm in actual size. The current smallest feature of 7nm wafer process is actually closer to 40nm, so we have a ways to go before we run into the limits of Electron wavelengths. It's actually rather amazing considering the wavelength of what they are using to etch the features on the wafers is almost an order of magnitude larger at around 193nm (for normal light, EUV is smaller, not that much tho). Speaking of light, that's 192nm not !(@nm Logitech, grr, something that's been bugging me for 3 years now.
Quite frankly, I don't give a single voxel about the snobs that scoff at anyone that looks at the keyboard, they can be somewhere else with there insulting ways (Sagittarius A is a nice place to imagine sending those types of people to, lol). As for the keys, I find it irritating that every so often I do look at the keyboard, and when I see the symbol on the left side of the keyboard on the top of the key, and instinctively press the shift for it, often resulting in the wrong thing thanks to no one making a Proper ANSI full-size backlight keycap set. I originally didn't worry too much when I got the K70 and G610, as their cherry keys, ye can 'supposedly' swap out the incorrect keycaps for ones that are correct. The difficulty has been locating said set of ANSI full-size keycaps with the left side glyphs in the correct spots. I've looked off and on since 2016, I have yet to find any. combined with cherry's rapid-fire and ignoring random keypress glitching, I sort of lost any interest in mechanical keyboards at this point. the never look at the RGB show on the keyboard crowd can keep their non-standard junk, I want something that actually works correctly that isn't mislabeled to trick us, mere mortals, into pressing the wrong thing. Speaking of pressing the wrong thing, I guess a few did click the subscribe button without the bass-ackwards keys tricking them into un-subbing.
Congrats, rather late, Buildzoid for the 100k subs. B)
Maybe someday, we can get motherboards that don't skimp out on USB ports for our keyboards, mice/trackballs, StreamDecks, X-keys, Wacoms tablets, External Soundcards, CAD 3D-mice, GamePads/Joysticks, WebCams, etc. I agree with BZ, motherboards that have less than 7 USB type A's on the back are pointless for a workstation. It's sad in a way, my FX8350 computer has more type A plugs internal or external, than a lot of modern boards have. Between the RGB controller, fan controller, front panel plugs, and CLC, 2 internal Type-A plugs just doesn't cut it. And that's not the only thing that is giving me doubts about a lot of z490 and B550 boards.
For now, a small meme, that will be back for more, lol. Thermal laws, and the rate of heat flow. Oh yeah, it's been a busy few weeks (GN news vid, random stuff) and this is only part of the stuff I hadn't gotten around to making a post on, yet.
well, an interim post, some fussing around with the versa dress and a few figures.
(goddess of oracles? Ethereal Fantasy?),
Left is Daisy8, this time with the dress all as that preset is instead of zones set to invisible for the monster tube top thing. Realy nice Rowana hair for elves. Next over is Violetta (Rendo) with an outfit I pulled out due to a promo that caught my eye for someone else. I messed up the skirt by forcing D-force on it, I could have done that better, however, it was the surface zones then the versatile dress shaders I was more interested in. Next is ADJA Alloralla, overall ok, some adjustments, tho overall not bad. Sherry hair was nice to work with (I don't recall auto fitting the G3F item to G8F, tho I may have). Then far-right is Norah, ahhhh, well, yeah. For a start, I will say turning the black dress preset on ADJA Alloralla to the left into a skirt, and using the Party monster top was rather fun, including the fun new AHOC memory OCing spell shirt design Buildzoid made. The Carla hair was also easy to set up. so, first up is Violetta skipping past Daisy that I only have nice nice nice to say about.
for the most part, Violetta was a pleasant surprise to set up, drop the maps into a 3DL shared throw a shaping dial and render away. As for the outfit
yes, Ethereal Fantasy outfit, as I was saying, I just don't want people looking at Alloralla's promo and thinking that outfit has more surface zones than it has. the entire area on Violetta that is green, is a single zone. so unless there is an add on texture set (oops, there is) I didn't notice, or you make maps yourself for the outfit, that is all going to be one shader preset there. The outfit does have plenty of zones to work with for the most part, and that is where the deforce forced onto the skirt was a mistake. I should have set the top edge of that skirt cloth as a separate zone so I could turn to deforce off on it, that way the cloth would not be falling off the metal band part. That is about the only missing zone on the thing, the rest is really nice. ... after digging up links, I notice I don't have the correct skirt matched with that bodysuit, hmmm, I think I made a few mistakes there. When going threw the smart tab icons of stuff, it looked like it belonged with it, lol. And it looks like the preset used in the promo is in the Ethereal Fantasy add-on set I didn't know existed.
eh. Other than that, really glad to have another cute elf in my collection.
ok, the FYI out of the way for the promos, I do have a few constructive criticisms for ADJA Alloralla. For one, the 3delight presets are on the dark side compared to the promos, which is rather easy to address with some value adjustments (more diffuse surface strength&brightness, less wax candle maybe). Also, the "ginger" eyebrow preset looks a tad more bleach-blond in 3delight than red, I ended up setting my own colors for that, shown above. Maybe someday I can find a shaping dial that tames the upper lip ledge a tad (Graystillplays lounging Tonsils not included), some are ok others a bit excessive, it's just
All I'll say here is maybe she looks incredible in Iray with the included Iray only mats, I'm not working in Iry. I knew this may be a 3DL failure given the store page, so I won't harp too much. I took one look at the two included spec maps and the complete lack of bump, and decided I wasn't going to play the how to tile one map for each surface zone without tiling the other maps game. As for the normal maps, it was just something I didn't want to waste time with, as so many times in the past the ever so slight rib shaping in Iray ends up looking like malnourished bulging ribs with some in 3DL or just a mess, so I didn't even bother looking, yet.
For some, it's just better to drop the Iray normals in 3DL and only use the bump maps. Norah has no bump maps, so, I borrowed all the spec and bump maps from FWSA Krisandra (no baked in eyebrow options for use with fiber-mesh brows), and went from there. the color maps are ok (they are not inverted colorspace maps), so things didn't go as bad as I was first afraid they would when first I looked at the maps folder. The PartyMonster top is a completely custom map I baked up for the stripes on the sleeves and the AHOC memory OC joke. I do need to look at some stuff more, tho over all the figure-shaping is ok, and the makeup options did go rather well.
ye know, 23.5c room temp (AHOC YT vid link) is a bit low compared to the ATX spec of below 40c inside a case, and just because some parts are rated for "up to" a Tmax of 125c does not imply that is the preferred operating temp for them.
ah, yeah, in any case, that short VRM test Buildzoid did was cool, and at least there was no breaking ceramics from thermal expansion of the metal film inside them. Just som rather toasty FETs. in a case with even modest airflow (forget the original Evolve or InOven cases), the VRM should be 'OK' so long as ye isn't pushing things. That particular Asrock isn't nearly as bad as some z490 ones Hardware unboxed looked at, tho that is for another pending post.
in the meantime, I guess I am going through some Computex withdrawals, esp the GN Steve vs PC World Gordon collabs.
With luck, we will maybe get some more content from the both of them, I hopes at least.
"we get it amd, ye can make a 3700x, like Nvidia can make a 1080ti", oof, just like motherboard makers are perfecting the featureless lump of metal some erroneously call a VRM heatsink, lol. Steve is being brutally honest again (YT 3800XT vid). 39% more watts for 3.7% more performance, really reminds me of the 7700k vs 6700k 200MHz bump, hmm.
Nice and fun renders as always:) So how come you use the plastic lighting model on the skin? Granted the skin model scattering is rather...uhm shall we say basic... but it is still useful IMO. And it takes maps;)
Yeah I rarely use normalmaps on skin. Sure you can add some additional detail but it will still look fake from certain angles. And the default shader does not have a strength slider, unless you go through the trouble of adding one in shadermixer.
Was cool to see your shadersettings, it's kinda fun we both ended up using 65% glossiness as a starting point;)
Wowie is working on a simplified shader for scripted pathtracing. It actually uses glossiness instead of the roughness/metallicity workflow of aweSurface. This is what it looks like at the moment.
So it accepts gloss maps. And I'm sure they will work better than with the default shader, I've never had much success using them.
that's cool, can think of lots of stuff to use that for, fiber mesh eyebrows maybe not, that should have been mostly diffuse and nothing else probably. unless ye is going for that hint of gray I guess, not sure ytar was supposed to have that (foreground holding a complete joke of a VRM cooler inspired by the Asrock b550m-itx/ac, lol.).
as for why the daz default, it is mostly for the instant spot renders, Omni isn't as bad as AoA, yet I do find both annoying to use when I'm just trying to match colors. I did look at the wowie shader a couple of months back for a swimming pool water surface thing, tho I didn't get far as life got in the way. I think there the maps were giving me grief, and not the shader, and I ended up shelving the idea for later when I had funds to legit purchase some better texture maps for the thing. I do recall the PDF wasn't too difficult to follow. it was just time and a bad choice of random item to try it on.
maybe that was just a bad light vs camera angle. well, the VRM cooler joke isn't, the fibermesh brows may be lighting, lol.
because I've dragged my feet digging up reference links, and that VRM thing really is not impressing me much, on to something a bit more fun. Vesta and Ceres. Oh, and the NASA model of DAWN is kind of nice as well (not included with the Vesta and Ceres scenes Alvin Bemar made). a day or so back, I had forgotten there was a Vesta at the daz store, and I had forgotten I had purchased it a month or so back.
I had downloaded a model elsewhere that I'm sure was the raw data from DAWN's altimeter, 674MB and change obj file (not including maps), OOF, lol. it was so detailed that I felt like my face was scraping across the surface of the rock as I moved around and I could almost taste and smell the dust kicked up by my chin, lol. sadly the 3950x and GTX1070 was on its knees screaming for mercy in dialup modem sound code as I was trying to center the module to set up a scene to render, at a glorious less than zero-point-one FPS. lol.
To be fair, I'm sure a 32GB Tesla V100 couldn't hold the model mesh, so, it's a bit rough to work with for 3D renders. That is a glorious model, I love the detail, I need a better computer, lol.
Thankfully Alvin Bemar has a "medium quality" model that I am just as happy to use and looks really good from a more comfortable distance. The medium quality model renders much more smoothly than the raw data model that came from some where else, lol.
there are a few nice close-up sections of the 4 kilometer across rock that won't crash your 32+GB computers. lol. it looks to be in the 430MB range for system memory, so thats good.
Because I don't want to sound like I'm just shilling, I got to poke a little fun at another team. Hay, MRO team, do ye have any GPR cross-section passes of Valles Marineris yet?
ye has only been orbiting that rock for 14 years now and it's not really a hard target to miss. It's only about four thousand kilometers long, about a thousand times longer than Vesta is across. It can't be that difficult to let the GPR record as ye passes over it anywhere along the length of the 'Giant Gouge' in the planet, It would be nice to see the data ye know. I guess there to distracted by looking for signs of life to notice such a PROMINENT feature.
Small technicality, "AROUND Valles Marineris", is NOT looking 'AT' Valles Marineris, maybe I'm just expecting too much. So, in any case, after the short 14-month survey of Vesta, not 14 years to Not look at it, DAWN took a stroll over to Ceres.
In fairness, I did just look again when typing this, the data does not exist.
This is another really nice scene that Alvin Bemar set up (DAWN craft NASA blender model not included). And there are a few really nice small sections of the rock, like Ahuna Mons (cool data, JPL)
random elivation tidbit, cool stuff (paper over yander at ResearchGate) and another random one about rock types and old vs younger dome stuff.
Consus.
kind of an unfortunate one that happens to be on the edge of quadrants there looking at, they are looking at it tho.
and a few others I have yet to look at (both Vesta and Ceres).
I'm really happy with the models, the scenes, and the work the DAWN team has done surveying the two bodies. Much appreciated.
well, I dragged my feet long enough. After a vid from Hardware unboxed (Bribes & Bullying to Prevent Bad Coverage, YT vid) convinced me, I shouldn't be so paranoid about my opinions about VRM thermal solutions despite the overwhelming amount of vitreal I have received on some channels from a few individuals, so here it is. I can only hope most caught wind of Hardware Unboxed's warning vids about some less than optimum z490 boards that shouldn't be paired with something like an i5 or i7, and in fact, I think a few of them were meant for i-zero's or underclocked i3's. I'll get to that, so, Thermal incompetence.
(much appreciation for the necklace string, the costume pendant and joke not-heatsinks I made myself. the 'Coffee Shop' cup I had to redo the UVing on, as the seam was smack in the middle of the logo spot on that side of the cup. G3F1W converted to G8F, using Paloma mats.)
I get that some don't like the looks of "real heatsinks", proper true fined heatsinks that are not crafted to inhibit the cooling functionality of the thing. Many more just don't care, they want a PC to 'do' something, and the rest of the stuff in the thing doesn't matter to them, and I totally understand wanting to 'use' a PC rather than constantly maintaining the thing. What I have an issue with, is how inefficient designs compound, bad FETs need more cooling, and bad heatsinks need a gluttonous watt consuming fan for that cooling, compounding how much power the system needs and heat it puts into the room, and it's not just a single PC. it's millions of 'affordable' PCs like that in any non-arctic country or region, on a power grid that likely is Not getting most of its power from renewable sources (I'll say no more on that angle). Yes, millions, there are about 7.6 billion people on earth, that's a lot of PCs even if only 10% of the population or 1% for that matter has one. To top it off, most live where AC units are needed during the summer, and that inefficient PC is probably in a room that's cooled by an AC that has to work harder to cool that room, due to inefficient design of the PC. It's multiple angles I'm looking at, it's not just me obsessing about how cool can I make something. it's a matter of if I can make it "this" much cooler, that is less work for the case fans to cool the thing, and ultimately, less noise and less work an AC unit has to do to keep me cool in the room with the PC. So even if some boards did not use the most inefficient FETs on the planet, a heatsink really helps. a finned heatsink, not a featureless lump of metal.
That thing really is a joke, a complete joke (GN B550 motherboard lineup Buildzoid ramble vid). And sadly, proper heatsinks are not on the cheapest boards with the worst FETs that need the cooling, there not even on mid-range boards with almost adequate VRMs. The only boards with proper heatsinks are boards with gluttonous VRMs that are wasting power by having way too many phases. It is kind of pathetic really, it's like there trying to offer a complete lineup of inefficient products from the incapable low end to the power wasting top end. Ye want a heatsink, ye has to pay 500+usd for a board that has a VRM so big it truly doesn't need the heatsink the lower end boards need to not be "almost adequate".
And it's played out in that z490 line-up. it's a bit difficult to see at first, however, the boards that did the worst, are ones with deliberately designed to not-cool blocks, and inadequate firecracker FETs. and B550 and x570 also had similar choices of inadequate VRMs to overpriced watt-hog bling.
Some are not just "almost adequate", they are completely inadequate to the point they should have used another VRM (HU, z490 Budget Buyers Beware of Lies & Misleading Marketing YT vid). oh, and that was at around 21c (69.8F), not 40c (104F) that a computer case is allowed to get up to according to the ATX spec. Only a note, that things 'can' be far worse in some airflow-challenged computer cases, than what Hardware Unboxed found in their tests.
one board maker even found a way to triple the power-wasting by putting 3 fans on an overpriced inefficient VRM, instead of just using a better VRM. (triple-Spleens, from "I Shouldn't Have Cloned My Cat 18 Times") The board is so over priced, that even for a 10400 you should not get (GN vid) at that price, the thing just isn't worth it.
(GN Asrock z490 Velocita YT vid) I agree with buildzoide with that one, if you need to put a fan on your VRM that isn't space-constrained, use a better VRM. if each fan uses 100mA at 12v, that's 1.2 watts per fan, multiply that by a million extra fans for PCs in any area, and ye sees how this adds up fast for power grids, and that is also more heat and noise to deal within the room. Also, It's not like there aren't options for a VRM block that actually has fins that can actually cool the thing. you kind of have to let fresh air get to it, you can't block it with an "air restrictor plate" as BZ calls them. Heatsinks do need to breathe, ye can't suffocate them in RGB heated blankets.
ok, I get it, 'everybody' HATES the 3D examples I came up with. I'm only pointing out that there are options for cooling. adding texture to the extrude molds can also help, calculating 'A' is simple geometry maths, have fun with that. So, it's not just VRM's that have had a decrease of fins over the years. Asetek monopolized the CLC market through litigation, then started making revision updates with ever-smaller micro fin areas, to the point that the gen7 Asetek pump is on the edge of not covering a zen2 CPU dies (especially if the 'round' pump is mounted at a 45), and is far short of direct micro-fin coverage of the Threadripper chiplets.
I'm sorry Steve, I respectfully disagree on one point, "stagnation" isn't quite how I would describe how Asetek cold plates have evolved, or shall I say, "de-volved" over time. just because the pump in the gen7 CLC supposedly moves more water, doesn't make a smaller fin area better for anyone other than Asetek's profit margins. The 'stagnation' Steve talked about, is shrinking the fins to match the same performance of the old design with a new faster pump, they could have easily had a better product and Asetek chose not to. Thankfully it looks like EK has an option for zen2 CPUs (GN EK AIO breakdown YT vid), even if I agree with Steve and I don't particularly like the RGB cover thing on the CLC (can I get that in no-RGB all-black?). I do work with 3D art, and the last thing I want in my workspace is a rainbow strobe in an otherwise color-neutral workspace. That's my looks preference more than objective cooling, I do like the rest of the EK cooler, so on with the thermal stuff. The Arctic Liquid Freezer II (another GN vid, that vs EK and others) also looks promising, I just hope that and the EK one doesn't end up with that Enermax Slime issue. as for mobile.
as with the opening linked vid from Hardware Unboxed, I do appreciate Techtesters for not caving to any wishes of ASUS with the test results of laptop manufacturing choices. (their vid is here, time-stamped to that comparison) It was implied that the gimping of the CPU and GPU cooler on the AMD model, was to lower the keyboard and SSD temps. I'm really sure, there are 'ways' (that's plural, as in more than one) to cool such parts without stifling the CPU and GPU cooler in the process.
I think what Tim was dealing with on another laptop (original TUF vid, and later TUF mod tests vid), was the more efficient 7nm process of AMD made the inadequate cooling of the SSD more apparent than on the far more inefficient 14nm Intel versions that run far hotter anyway. And Tim did have a few good points, move the SSD to the other slot, and open up the vents to let fresh air in over the SSD locations. I really don't think that AMD laptop cooler obsolescence was related to what AdoredTV had hinted at possibly happening in an intel "meets Competition" discussion vid some time back. I get that things have happened in the past that were not good (AMD vs intel Adored vid). I think this is just the thermal-incompetence of the individuals making product construction decisions, nothing more than that. I don't even think they are looking at the compound results of the inefficiency of the end result of their product choices. their just looking at how to make it cheaper for more profit to keep the shareholders happy, and some things get forgotten during the bean-counting process. That said, I am not happy with a lot of cooler choices of late. I keep seeing the same mistakes over and over and over again. The case needs to let in air, the coolers need an adequate surface area that air can get to for cooling them, and the VRMs need to be efficient with minimal waste heat production for the intended components there powering.
edit 2020 AUG 09. ok, maybe they don't 'all' suck for cooling. I guess there are a few laptop makers trying to do Linus's free walk in the rain advice, "make the best thing you can, for the cheapest price you can". Hardwear Unboxed XMG laptop intel vs AMD prelim look vid.
its been an interesting week with almost no ambition aside from watching cool vids from various creators. I set out a week ago to do something, got distracted by a need to fix something up that was needed for some basic scaling, then other things happened. Needles, to say, the funny render idea I had, has yet to happen. today, while randomly clicking through vids, I came across a very interesting question in the comments of a timelapse vid. "What is the definition of a supercomputer?", that is a very good question, as I keep seeing so many references to "data centers" in confusion when looking at pics of rows of CPU node racks of a supercomputer.
That is a good question, yet I don't think it is a 'fixed' number, and is more a relative to what exists at the time. there was a time a CRAY2 was a supercomputer of sorts (1.9 GFLOPS peak performance), yet many years later in around 1998, PC CPUs were arguably in the 2 GigaFLOPs range (pushing 4 opps per cycle at around 550MHz or so). Thing is, a Supercomputer in 1998, wasn't defined by having more than 1.9 GigaFLOPS, it was defined by having "orders of magnitude more than a single PC", to be able to do simulations that would take a single PC CPU decades to do. That kind of carries over to today when intel had been stuck on 4 core at around 4GHz CPUs for around 10 years or so on consumer PCs, and supercomputers keep getting more and more nodes with more cores (to keep moving the decimal point of the GigaFLOPS number). back in 1999, someone at Cray did have a funny definition of a Supercomputer that also is fitting, "A supercomputer is a machine that is one generation behind what you really need to do the simulations you want to run on it", lol.
A supercomputer is designed to have the lowest latency highest bandwidth connection between processors as possible, as simulations often rely on data from calculations performed by other nodes in the machine. ye can't pull out a PE node and have a self-contained operating computer. it may power on, then hang waiting on the job queue to tell it it's ID, and what to do. lol. Assuming it even has a PSU in the rack unit. Now, a data center can have supercomputers in it, however, it is more a collection of self-contained servers with an emphasis on data connections to users out on the web for stuff like forums, web pages, etc. So long as the network is sufficient for the external trunks and internal backups and machine cloning, there isn't as heavy of a need on extreme low-latency high-bandwidth links between nodes in a data center, unlike for a Supercomputer where latency is as critical as processor performance.
spent the past week playing with mesh, and fussing with conflicting lights in a scene, lol. that said, I did make some progress on the SFIA Fusion Candle, added them intake blowers I wanted on the thing since I first started that project.
That only added around 77MB or so of geometry to the Fusion Candle Platform. That is a bit on the oof side for Iray yet also isn't anything like the forget Iray Destiny or the Atlantis City Ship levels of geometry, lol. The result being around 180MB for the obj (instead of multiple tens of gigs).
So, there is the WIP v03001 so far. included in the zip this time, is that teardrop-shaped prop I used to make the jet, it's a WIP that still needs some work, yet it's something to start with. I originally started with an opacity map fading to nothing at the ends, and decided to just not use it in favor of 10% opacity for each layer of the flame prop with ambient. I did use a few copies of the prop at thinner and thinner sizes to get the full effect. in other news, I decided to play with some more G3F to G8F conversions.
L to R, is converted FW Sushmita with V8 substituted for V7 with Rowana Hair and Sweet Summer dress and Morphing Pumps, FW Sushmita original with Samantha Hair and Midnight Club Dress, and both using FWSA Vanessa's ears. on the right is FWSA Vanessa converted to G8F with Sherry Hair and Ballet Practice. P.S., yeah, that's FWSA Sandi in the background playing with the RC Fusion Candle, lol. Something that is abundantly clear with the Sushmita conversion, is V8 is not the same as V7 shape, that lack of face and chest matching is not from the conversion. Maybe I'll go through the trouble of converting V7 to G 8F, however, there already is a V7 for G8F shape around the store so I feel a tad blah about not using the product that already exists for that. As for Vanessa, her ears did convert over really nicely, the same goes for EJ Cintia below.
L to R, SASE Sprout at about 50% shape dial strength with Sabela Hair, and EJ Cintia converted to G8F with Rowana Hair. both with dForce Bliaut dress. I have a few notes on this.
First off, the ears really are nice on Sprout, even tho a mistake has omitted the existence of the separate ear dial on Sprout's pager, things happen.
Also, a month or so back, I noticed a new setting in the D-force stuff, Self collide. For that particular dress it was a bit iffy before that, so very much appreciated that D-force now has self collide.
So with that for now, I'll head back to the other desk with this public notice from Gamers Nexus on CLC orientation, YT vid.
so, aside from intel launching, I think it was the AMD Ryzen 4800U mobile processor (funny 11th gen intel GN vid). RTX30 has happened I guess, and this I think is a bit more relevant for things like Iray. So far all we have is an announcement and some vague specs, however I would urge people that are only working with Iray to hold off for 2 critical reasons. First and foremost, the Underapriciated Devs at Daz3d and other 3D software companies still need to incorporate the new Iray SDK that supports the new GPU into their apps, and it took Nvidia several months to get a Iray SDK out to devs the last several launches. So it may be anywhere from 3 months to 6 months if not longer before Iray will even run on the new cards from Daz Studio. Case and point, it took Nvidia a year to get an Iray SDK out the door that supports the extra features of Turing (Dec2019 vs Turing Launch Date). for some things like "Concurrent Compute" (CUDA SMT FP+int like thing), it was mentioned at the Turing launch event then I heard NOTHING since. in fact, google only returns results of me asking about it back when Turing launched, when I google it, lol. I asked, and it was a hush hush thing with no promises, and since there has been nothing said. I can only guess it's more effort than Nvidia is willing to put into Iray to use the only thing that would have made RTX20 look better than GTX10 parts, or maybe Iray just cant take full advantage of "Concurrent Compute" so it's not something worth bragging about. in any case, the lackluster memory for the cost made RTX20 a bit meh for Iray anyway. Oh, that was just the first reason to not jump the gun on RTX30 yet, yet, yet. The other is simply what little we do know so far without actual testing.
What little we do know, is a bit lacking, especially when involving Blender Cycles, Arnold, and especially Vram limited Iray. We have some prices, and a preliminary memory amount, along with a CUDA core count that I feel is a bit suspect (I do need to tally up a history on that CUDA count vs watt thing, it's on my short list). So here is an abridged chart of specs that are preliminary at best. Less than 4GB is ill-advised for Iray and many games these days, hence the blotted out in red ones. It is well past 2016, Do NOT get a new card with less than 4GB on it, the 4GB GT730 (GK208) and 4GB GTX900 cards do exist instead.
Given the launch-day prices, if you are in the 600usd budget range and above, I see some upgrades available for Iray scene complexity. Given the RTX3070 has 'only' 8GB again, gives me less hope for those that could only swing for a GTX1070 within the past 4 years, as I doubt those folks will magically have a 2x larger budget now especially considering other things going on in the world.
So, the second reason to not jump the gun, is we simply have no clue how or when the new GTX30 cards will run Iray. You could be sitting on a card you can't use (except for playing games on) for a month, or it may be 6 months, we just don't know yet, and it will suck to find out months after a return policy expired that maybe ye didn't get what ye wanted for use with Iray when Iray SDK is incorporated into a Daz Studio release build.
Drrp, forgot about the stock cooler (GN random thoughts vid), beyond that, in short, I have doubts especially for use as compute cards packed like sardines in a render box. The cooler does look interesting, to say the least, further testing will be needed tho. I sort of doubt the Quadros will get that nifty airflow through the card cooler. That cooler may be why Nvidia opted to ditch SLI Nv-Link-Whatever on the 3080 and lower-end parts. I do have doubts about cooling 2+ RTX3090's with the stock cooler. Oh, and I dread how these higher-watt RTX30 cards will do in modern no-airflow for-looks-only desk ornaments deceptively marked as computer cases. lol.
Nvidia: our new cooler is able to cool the GPU and our new connector can handle the watts, so we fixed the issues of higher performance cards and watt-creap for y'all.
Me: (looks at the electric bill and struggling AC unit) lol.
just a short still around and kicking post. RTX30 is here, and it looks like it may have some promise even tho the somewhat lackluster amount of memory on the RTX3070 gives me doubts about the more affordable 300 to 400 USD range of cards vs the 8GB GTX1070 that I do have. Also, I'm not gnawing at the bit to preorder any RTX30, as it looks like the Iray SDK that devs need to make 3D apps work with the new cards isn't even ready yet (as of typing this, and yes I tried both versions of "RTX 3080")
So chilling a bit longer is a good thing. That said, there are some really good non-iray tests around from the likes of Gamers Nexus (Youtube vid), Hardware Unboxed (YouTube), and TechGage (non-gaming CGI/CAD creator benchmark webpage).
Be cool y'all, and don't be caught flat-footed with a doorstop ye can't use for a little bit longer as devs work things out with Iray.
from the looks of things that I haven't been following like a hawk, there have been some potential updates to the status of some things. From the perspective of a red dwarf system on the extreme outskirts of Sextans-B looking up at the sky, there has always been some debate whether or not the surrounding galaxies were part of the Milkyway-Andromeda local group or not. (view of Sextans A from said red dwarf system, as a few look back at Andromeda and the Milkyway)
I really am more than happy with the explanation of "an irregular galaxy that may be part of the Local Group, or lie just beyond it." akin to a kyper-belt dwarf planet or ort-cloud status kind of ambiguity rather than comparing looking at Saturn from the earth for only one day with the question of if they're both parts of the same solar system (not debating that Saturn is, just orbit and time comparison wise).
At 4.44 million lightyears away, the orbital period of such a distant entity is in the order of billions of years, much longer than earth existed. at that kind of distance and time, it's kind of difficult to record more than 1% of an orbit/trajectory to say definitively it is or isn't in orbit around the gravitational center of the Milkyway-andromeda local group. (bellazzini.pdf with cool plots of the Sextans galixies from Sexten-cfa)
the redshift data is interesting, the Antlia Sextans Group is moving away with a redshift of around 350km/s on a rough average, everything else in the local group is moving the opposite way with redshift data. redshift is kind of like having a really long string strung out to something, any movement toward or away will be incredibly accurate in how fast the string is pulled out of your hand. the one thing a flexible string can't easily tell you is up down or left-right movement as the string is affected by gravity and it's incredibly difficult to get accuracy to record enough data to determine those directions precisely, especially with something 4.44 million lightyears away. so at this time, we can say the group is gravitationally bound to itself, and moving somewhat independent of the rest of the local group, we haven't been around long enough to determine if the group is passing by or if we are seeing it on the outbound side of an elliptic orbit around the local group.
in other news, the Daz Studio update looks interesting, tho I'm not sure I will have time this week to dig into it, let alone ketchup with the zen3 launch and AMD 6800 Graphics.
there is some stuff in the email that does look good, despite my decision to take a pass on RTX30 for at least a month or so, as the 8GB GTX1070non-ti works well enough without costing me money I don't have to get something newer that doesn't offer that much more VRAM to work with for 3D scenes. I do look forward to playing with the new daz toys, it just won't be within the next few days if not a tad longer.
so much cool stuff. Hmm, be cool y'all.