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SKYLAB CHAT

Seliah (Childe of Fyre)

Running with the wolves.
CV-BEE
Contributing Artist
It has dropped to 6 degrees...I'm beginning to wonder how low it's going to go. The furnace is running more than it's off. Oh well, I have a green bean, green peppers, and onion stir fry on the stove, and am about to start the rice cooking, so lots of heat in here.

We're currently at -2 here, and it's continuing to drop...

That's really sad about your partner, Sky. But I think it's great that you found someone to connect with that much. That's such a valuable thing to have when you find it...

Working with someone is almost always the best way to go about things. Up until recently, I didn't have any choice but to work completely alone. There was no one I connected with like that until maybe this last year or so. I still mostly work alone, though at least now I can zip into the forums here to get input or feedback/critique/how-to's on things, or I can get onto Skype and get some good input from the folks on there.

But up until last year, I was pretty much alone just doing my own thing, and the folks I spoke to online were, while being creative writing partners and absolutely very supportive (my own family was not until last year), they just were not 3D artists themselves, so there's only just so much "shop" talk you can do before they're coming back to you with responses like "Huh?" or "Uhm... ok." One of my co-writers is famous for letting me know when the shop talk is going over her head by simply responding with, "English please?"

I'm very sorry you lost your partner. But I'm also glad you had her. I hope that makes sense.
 

skylab

Esteemed
And...I've been working on testing poses...and Andy landed where he was supposed to , after creating poses that were hip controlled instead of body controlled...yay! Now if I can just break the habit of selecting the body...old dog, new tricks :)
 

Seliah (Childe of Fyre)

Running with the wolves.
CV-BEE
Contributing Artist
And...I've been working on testing poses...and Andy landed where he was supposed to , after creating poses that were hip controlled instead of body controlled...yay! Now if I can just break the habit of selecting the body...old dog, new tricks :)

It takes time to get into a new habit! ;)

I learned to do the translations by hip instead of body years back when I was actually *submitting* freebies to 3DCommune. One of the helpful folks over there (I forget her name now, it's been years!) mentioned that she very much liked the poses, but could I please use the hip instead because she was tired of having to play hide and seek to find her figure when she was done using one of my poses...

LOL. I ended up "fixing" all of the poses I had done up to that point and got myself into the habit of using the hip for translations after that. :D

And on that note... it's almost 6am here for me. I think I'm going to go crawl into bed and nest down for a sleep. :)
 

skylab

Esteemed
Oh yes, I'm okay about it now...we were childhood friends...imagine sandbox and swing set stuff, then life took us in different directions, she married and moved several states away, I got busy with career, yada, yada....then she contacted me by email, and we do the what's new with you thing, and I learned early on not to even try to explain 3D work...you can just watch people's eyes glaze over, they have no idea what we're saying. So, I sent her a link to my website, and she responded back with basically wow, and she wanted to learn to do that...and that's how it started. If I have a regret, it was that she couldn't have started years earlier, no telling what she could have accomplished had she had more time to do it. But, we never know how much time we have, we just do the best we can with what time we do have.
 

skylab

Esteemed
Okay, have a good rest...and I'll catch you later...here's Andy :)

andy poses.jpg
 

skylab

Esteemed
Wow, -13....you must be on the coast...if the wind blows at all, it can be just awful. It seems we've bottomed out in the 5 to 7 degree range. My fishy was looking at me like WHAT? He catches the draft from around the kitchen window, so I've got his heater on now, so he's fine...haha .

Just thought I'd share a few of the superfly renders...those were my first attempts, no tweaking, just taking default lighting, and as D3D created them. That's why I mentioned recently that superfuly mats would probably be great for still life, or vehicles.
 

Seliah (Childe of Fyre)

Running with the wolves.
CV-BEE
Contributing Artist
Yeah, -13 and temps are supposed to range from -5 to as low as -30, with windchill bringing that even lower, -25 to -60.

I'm actually not on the coast here, but I admit the coast is just a couple hours away by car. We frequently get the Arctic air/temps during the winter, but I've heard them even on the radio advising people to stay indoors and to keep taps dribbling a bit to help prevent bursting pipes. And we have about an inch of frost on the *inside* of our back door handle.

Yes, I think those MATs would definitely look nice on still life renders. How long did it take the pc to render those?
 

skylab

Esteemed
Yeah, I've seen the frost on the inside before...last year when we were in the deep freeze for so long...haha.

The rendering time on those was not long at all, but then they were very simple scenes, no more than two Andys at a time. I'd guess a couple of minutes...hard to guess, didn't time it, but it felt like no more than 90 seconds or perhaps two minutes. I've been multi-tasking so much, I leave one thing and go to another during rendering. I don't have a special video card, just on board graphics. I would imagine the more complicated the scene, the longer the rendering time. But then I can't do very complicated scenes even with firefly.
 

skylab

Esteemed
Oh my, 67 degrees...doesn't that make you want to cry....haha. Oh well, I keep telling myself, three more weeks until daylight savings time change...this year it's Sunday, March 13 at 2:00 a.m. Something to look forward to :)
 

Seliah (Childe of Fyre)

Running with the wolves.
CV-BEE
Contributing Artist
So we had one set of pipes freeze in our apartment, thankfully nothing burst. Low point overnight reached -17, and it was -23 with windchill. Upstairs apartment in the rear of the building did fine, but our tenant in the front upstairs apartment turned the heat off.... my Bear was NOT happy today. We have to replace the pipes.; ALL of them froze, and quite a few of them burst. And there's only so much we can do about recouping the cost of that because that tenant is his brother. To put it in perspective, my Bear insisted the heat be turned up to 72 in the house and left there all night... and inside the house never got above 50 degrees. o_O

I have coffee now. I'm semi-human. LOL
 

Terre

Renowned
And...I've been working on testing poses...and Andy landed where he was supposed to , after creating poses that were hip controlled instead of body controlled...yay! Now if I can just break the habit of selecting the body...old dog, new tricks :)
That explains why one of the first things Jim taught me was to select the hip.
 

skylab

Esteemed
Good evening all...I finally crawled from under my blanket to do the nocturnal thing again tonight. Other family members upstairs keep a normal sleep schedule, I like to stay up during storms or severe weather to sorta "keep watch", since I can sleep when I want.

Hey Miss B :) And Seliah, how awful, you've had bursting pipes. I was thinking last night, some of the temps you were mentioning, sounded mighty rough. When you're in your own home, you can be somewhat prepared by wrapping pipes and keeping the heat turned up, but when someone else is turning off the heat...like what did the guy think would happen...geez.

I'll be doing an all nighter again tonight...but I don't think it will be as cold tonight. We hit bottom at the 4 or 5 range, I think, last night.
 
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