The Sound of One Hand Clapping

Absent from the blog this weekend but back to work bright and early this morning to find over 100 emails waiting to be trashed. Most were eager to tell me that there are now ways to make me ‘smell from fragrant below the belt’, though what’s wrong with my habit of keeping a car freshener shaped like a pine tree down there, I really don’t know. The rest were the usual admonitions about the dangers of not giving a woman satisfaction, which doesn’t so much take the romance out of sex as make it sound like an Asda price promise. Hidden among the SPAM, there was one invitation for Richard & Judy to attend at TV-themed quiz night in a Cornish pub. Naturally, I must reply with my list of demands before we attend, including a barrel of ale for Judy and an ermine lined throne for Richard.

I will spare you the boring details of my animation work, except to say that I’ve hit a ceiling where my PC specifications run out. I quickly made this David
Cameron animation to test a hand rig I’d set up overnight. It took about an hour to render on my PC which is suffering from having a very old graphics card. I really need one of those lovely Nvidia cards with CUDA which add 300+ processing threads and produce almost real time rendering for this level of detail. However, after the expense of my new hard drive, I think I’m going to have to work around this problem, perhaps only rendering the finished animations overnight. Though, if it takes an hour to render a few seconds of a simple scene, I hate to think how long it will need for what I have planned.

Other than that: this animation has convinced me that I need to take more time on my modeling. The body looks horrible and the head doesn’t work (though I haven’t yet rigged the eyes). When I move beyond these tests, I might adopt a simplified cartoon style, rather than a more photorealistic effect I’ve taken here.