March 2012: A look forward

March 2012 is still 6 months away but I’m already getting anxious for this month to come to a head. Why? Well, it means a serious hardware and software upgrades!

For your interest… here’s the evolution of what’s made WoodMarvels.com possible

• at launch
• current set-up (with frying incident) – I’ve actually fried yet another since then, but it took only a few days to replace the motherboard this time around.

There is so much more I want to do with WoodMarvels.com and by extension its sister site, 3DMarvels.com – some of which you’ll see happening in a few months which I’m so excited about but one constant problem I have to deal with here are rendering bottlenecks. I can’t draw so say goodbye to art school nor do I program so say goodbye computer school…. only these two streams offered 3D courses back in the day so I took it upon myself to teach myself 3D when I was a teenager on an industrial workstation which cost me 10K and was only available to large manufacturers (I had to fib to get my hands on it). I borrowed and work my ass off to afford it but it paid for itself many times over so it was the best investment I ever did!

Bottlenecks

I guess if I only ran WoodMarvels.com, the rendering bottleneck wouldn’t be AS BAD…

Monster Box: 3D Assembly Animation (720HD)

but I also render 3D industrial animations with i3DS which take-up a lot of processor time (one industrial project I’ve been rendering has been going for the past few months when ever there is some idle time)…

Orbitform 3D Industrial Animation: Orbital Forming 2.0

There is 3DMarvels.com taking up some time when ever I can…

Cool Tricycle 3D Printer File from 3DMarvels.com (720HD)

I also produce another show on the side (I have many side projects) HowToChinese.com which takes about 2-3 hours to render alone at 1080 resolution for each segment…

Mandarin Chinese Possessive Patterns

I’m also looking farther ahead with new technologies such as 3D stereoscopic rendering (automatically doubling rendering times), 4K resolutions and tons of more video production across all the properties (will make announcement in a few months about this).

Suffice it to say, my HP laptop has impressed me tremendously, it works harder than most industrial workstations and I only fried it twice!

What makes March 2012 so special?

First off, it’s when Intel releases its new Ivy Bridge architecture, I’m already eying a Dell workstation costing about 10K with dual-socket processors but I’m holding off until this is made available – 6 months isn’t long to wait for such a massive speed/technological boost, USB 3 capabilities etc.

Second, Windows 8. Say what you will about Windows but Windows 7 has been amazing compared to XP (I skipped Vista) and with tighter integration with Intel, SSDs etc… something definitely worth upgrading to.

Third, 3DS Max 2013 should be released around this time (give or take a few months) along with updates to e-on, Sony Vega Pro and a few other programs which I use DAILY. In fact, I’m on 3DS Max several hours a day and it runs on my computer all night rendering as it is. More GPU integrated rendering is an exciting development which I look forward having the pleasure of playing with!

Although I’m extremely happy with how things are progressing now… I always want to make things better in every way. I got to where I am today by constantly trying to improve my personal and business live incrementally on a daily/weekly/monthly/yearly basis.

Medieval Castle Walls B: How to Build (HD)

Still my favorite animation so far for WoodMarvels.com – it needs to be rendered in stereoscopic 4K!!!