Nov 19, 2004

Hooray for memory problems

Went to studio this morning, and the instructor told me to make my models more intricate. I now must do a lot more actual framing using micro-lumber, which Ace hardware is out of. The wood I need is 6x2 inch studs in real life, or 1/16" by 1/64" in 1/8"=1' scale. It was kind of amusing, the instructor gave us Charette week survival tips. (Charette is the time crunch, when people frantically design and work towards a deadline. Comes from the french slang for the cart that would collect the final blueprints.) Here are a few tips he mentioned:
JOE'S GUIDE TO CHARETTE SURVIVAL
1) Get at a minium of 4 hours of sleep in a 24 hour period.
2) Don't do intricate work when you're really short of sleep, this is the time when you end up slicing fingertips off with X-acto knives.
3) Drink plenty of water. Lack of sleep (combined with diruetic caffeine) will dry you out.
4) Eat every 8 hours.

After class, I drove to a hobby shop a few miles from here. They had the wood I needed, and at a better price than Ace hardware. I'll have to remember them. There's always a huge rush on specific supplies. I need to remember to stock up as soon as I get a materials list.
After I got back, I worked on my interior rendering on Form-Z, remembering to save constantly. This program crashes more than anything I've ever worked with. I finished fine tuning the lights and the objects around nine PM, then it took the computer about half an hour to do one test render at a quality level of 3 (out of 10). I then set the quality to 4 and let it process, and it took about an hour and a half. When it was done, it looked very credible, but then when I tried to save the view, the program crashed, and the rendering solution was lost.
I opened it again, and as it was nearing 11:30, I realized that I was not going to make the midnight deadline at Kinko's. Resolving to make the best of a bad situation, I set the quality level to five to let it process overnight. It would have worked, had the program not frozen up. I went online to the class announcement board hoping for some advice on cutting render time, and I found that the professor had postponed the due date until monday since everyone is having trouble with computer memory. This is good and bad. Good that I can get it perfected for a higher grade in the class, (which I really need) and bad since its more work to do over the weekend. Of all my projects at this time, I have the model about 25% done, the Life of Pi paper in rough outline and a paragraph or two, and the modeling completed for the computer modeling project. The sections, plan, watercolor perspectives, photocollages, and sociology project I have not even started yet.

Just got to remember to get 4 hours of sleep a night.

1 comment:

Nancy Case said...

Loved your teacher's advise. Your mother couldn't have put it any better!

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