Greetings and salutations! The sculpt for Aphrael isn't done yet. Part of the reason is because more and more of my time is being taken up by schoolwork. The other is that I am having issues with the computer that I use to produce my art.
One of things that I have learned as I have attempted to transition from 2D to 3D art is that 3D art is highly resource and time consuming to do. In regards to resources, you need a very powerful computer to actually run the programs needed to produce said 3D art. When I first started school at The Art Institute, I had asked my instructors what kind of computer would I need to be able to run these applications so I can work on my homework. The school has computers but I cannot get to the school everyday on a regular basis because I don't have a car and the bus system where I live is quite terrible. So I needed some way to do my homework. The closest response that I got was that I needed 8Gb of RAM to run Maya. Me being naive and not really knowing computer components that much, I bought a laptop off of that advice.
Now my laptop has been nice. I do like it. However, as I have built my knowledge in 3D art, I realized that unlike 2D art, 3D art requires more than one program to use. In addition, since I will be going into game development, I also needed to learn how to use the most state of the art game engines. Soon, there were many different kinds of software that I need to learn and my laptop is not even close to powerful enough to run them (ZBrush and Marvelous Designer are good examples of programs I badly need but can't run). One of the things I have learned is that processors for laptops are quite different from processors for desktops and workstations. They are quite underpowered for their high cost which is disappointing. My laptop has a quad core processor but it only has a clock speed of 1.9 Ghz. Thus high-end renders take forever to get out, making it impossible for me to complete some school assignments just because I am still waiting for the renders!
Another thing that I have learned is that I need a powerful graphic card to take up some of the load for rendering from the CPU as well as using it just to run graphics heavy programs like Unreal Engine 4 or Mudbox. My laptop doesn't have a graphics card per se. It is a Radeon 7640G integrated with the APU of the laptop. Thus in practice, I only have 500 Mb of dedicated memory for graphics rendering, which is really low. I need at least 1-4 Gb of dedicated memory for just the graphics card if I am going to run the high-end applications much smoother and without breaking the computer.
Finally, as I have mentioned, I am having issues with the laptop. In just the last few months, I have been getting memory leaks that will cause the laptop to crash while running Windows 8.0. I have not upgraded to 8.1 because I have heard that some users had their entire hard drives wiped when trying to upgrade and I cannot afford to lose my work since I don't have enough memory storage items to store all of it. In addition, I thought I had solved the memory leaks previously, only for it come back in full force and affecting multiple Windows applications, so I now have to run my laptop from the task manager with the Windows Explorer application off. If you don't know what Windows Explorer is, it is the system app that runs the desktop, files, tile systems and basic keyboard functions like volume control and the like. The memory leak stems from this app. I thought it may have been a virus but if it is, it is well hidden because I have used multiple tools, virus and malware scanners and the most up to date tools on the Internet to locate the problem and have come up empty. I have also heard of Windows 8 having serious memory bugs anyway so I wouldn't be surprised that Microsoft has yet to fix the issue since they are moving on to Windows 10.
So anyway, the computer I need really is out of my price range at the moment, but I may have no choice but to somehow get one. I plan on talking to Microsoft about the memory leaks tomorrow, but regardless of what they say, I really do need a more powerful computer. I have a tax refund coming, but I was hoping to get it before President's Day so I could take advantage of any sales that may be happening during this time. The computer I need should have an i7 4790K that runs at 4.0 Ghz with 8 virtual threads. Just having this alone will speed up my renders significantly. Next, I need 16 Gb of RAM, but I am thinking of getting a computer at only 8Gb of RAM and then upgrading it later like I did with my laptop. Then the graphic card needs to be very powerful, like a Radeon 290X or a 285. It needs to be at least 1Gb of memory though I prefer it to be at least 2Gb. If I can get one that allows to link several at once, I would do that so I can add more later.
Ugh, I hate spending money because I don't have money to spend. I have been unemployed and very poor for a very long time now, thus one of the reasons why I am going to school so I can at least get into a career that I am actually good at and not one where I can't even make my quota for the day and then get fired because I suck at it. I'm not good at fixing things, taking phone calls, performing customer service or selling things. I am only good at doing character art, designing games and creating game mechanics. Those are my forte. However, if I am going to get recognized, I have to be better than everyone else and that requires computer power that I currently don't have. Thus I must spend more money to get it.
Sorry about my rant. Life is very frustrating and has been for a very long time but I hope to turn my life around after I am done in school. We'll see what happens. Hopefully my next post will be more cheerful. I also hope to have Aphrael's sculpt done soon as well so stay tuned!
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