The ice and snow are gone and I have my dropbox files back, now it is back to work. Lately I have only been able to do any work at the office, getting in 3 hours before anyone else and use a stinking 32bit Dell that they call our ‘High-end’ Engineering computers.
Getting the dropbox files back turned out to be just a matter of un-linking the computer from dropbox while online and it set itself up again correctly. I don’t have a clue what went wrong but I am happy they are back.
Snow days were great when I was in grade school and just about as much fun when our factory shuts down but when you loose power because of ice storms you can’t do much of your own ‘fun’ work at home.
Let’s all hope it starts to warm up. 🙂
I was looking into fading out some text for the opening in some training videos for work and found a few that animated the material alpha or transparency for the fade out. Finding this using nodes to set up my materials presented a problem; I couldn’t find the transparency toggles. Well, using nodes I hunted and with a little trial and error found what I needed and this is the results of my experiments.
To start off with, the new computer was the easiest computer I have ever had to download and install all the programs I use on a daily basis. That includes registering setting up outlook. All in all it took approximately 4hrs start to finish.
Now the problem. For some reason all of my files in my dropbox folder are not visible. Nothing is hidden and I can see them when I am in, say MS Word or Excel and open them just fine. When I go to the folder I see nothing. Time to do a little trouble shooting. Incidentally, I am on my little macbook air now and I can see all my files within this computer.
hmmmm curiouser and curiouser.
By this time when I get home I should have a new computer. I purchased a new Alienware M17x R4 with 16gig memory, 1080p monitor, GTX680 Graphics Card, 1T HD and Blue Ray player/DVD burner. This computer is completely void of any software other than the operating system (Windows 7) so the weekend will be spent downloading/installing software. Boy what fun!
🙂
Not really sure what to do now. Am I going to upgrade my computer or get a new one possibly better at the same or lower price. Things to ponder today.
While I make that decision I am going to be splitting this site into multiple pages based on topics etc.. I am not too familiar with WordPress and how to do this however I am sure, with a little research I will be able to figure it out. Hey, I was able to get this WordPress working wasn’t I?
I received notification the lei I purchased and am having delivered to Desiree’ has shipped and will arrive as planned before 3:00pm today.
Tax return came and I am taking the time to upgrade my hard drive to 1TB, doubling the ram to 16gig (still have room to bump to 32gig) and changing the graphics card to an Nvidia Geforce GTX 660M that should come close to doubling the speed of my current computer. I’ll put the graphics card and old hard drive into an older model laptop I have (the power supply is more than adequate) giving me a second computer for just rendering out animations while I work on this new upgrade.
Fun times 🙂
It is so much more enjoyable working with materials and textures when you are NOT working with a tutorial. Tutorials point you in the correct direction, all the time with little or no explanation of what is happening when you make ajustements to the multitude of variables. Doing it yourself gives you a much more indepth learning experience, as long as you take notes of what happened when you made your changes. A trick I learned was if you are not sure what a setting will do, make a very drastic change so what you did will be very noticeable. Then back off on the adjustment so you understand exactly what is happening. At least that technique works for me.
I spent the weekend watching movies like Toy Story and Brave. It sure is somthing watching the animation in Toy Story, then the two and three then on to watching Brave. The skill of the animator and the animation films has improved so much over the years.
Lately I have been comparing the creation of materials/shaders in the properties panel the creating the same material in the compositor and it is interesting. I think I will put together a video showing what is happening in each as you build your material in one and then the other. Working on the material in the properties panel from creation is not nearly as intuitive as in the compositor as you will see however once you see how your actions in the material panel affect how and where nodes show up in the compositor things start clicking into place.
Going to end this now as I am haveing serious network problems here at home.