Posted on October 20, 1999

• “Modern Prometheus”, sort of a Halloween pic I guess, is new today in the Posers gallery and the WIP. For those of you who use Poser 4, the “Monster” is a Poser figure deformed by the Magnet tool.

  Almost ashamed to tell you all this, but I bought myself a new computer yesterday. My original plan was to pick up a decent sub $1000 box to help me render the print versions of my images (these are taking a week or more on my P333). Lately, however, Windows 98 has been acting up on me (more than usual) to the point where I’ve been losing files and the hours of work that went into them. Win98 simply can’t go where I want to go today.

  So instead of buying some cheapo Celeron to act as my renderbox, I’ve decided to demote my current machine to that position. Taking it’s place will be a Dell Precision 410 workstation with dual PIII 600 processors, 1 GB ECC SDRAM, and a 36 GB SCSI disk. The machine will be running Windows NT, which I’ve heard is a great deal more stable and powerful than 98. I didn’t feel like messing with Athlon processors right now, even though they’re supposedly much faster than the Intel chips. Xeon processors were a little pricey for my blood, and I’m not sure what benefit they provide for the extra money.

  I’ve purchased a copy of Inspire 3D, the “Learning Edition” of Lightwave 3D. Inspire, so I’ve read, has about 80% of Lightwave’s features for only 25% the price. I plan on using Inspire to cut my teeth on the Lightwave interface before I get the full edition.

  Why’d I chose Lightwave? Probably because 3DS MAX doesn’t have a $400 “Light” edition and I don’t want to be overwhelmed by features when I’m trying to learn. I’ve seen some really cool work done with Lightwave (ever seen “Titanic” or “Babylon 5”?). It’s also what my idol, the Digital Knight, uses 🙂

  Why do I need all this horsepower? The simplistic answer is that the more CPU you have, the closer you get to that mythical “instant feedback” which all 3D designers (myself included) crave. The more memory you have, the more detailed your world can be. The two are inversely proportional, so more of one means less of the other. Somewhere in the middle is 3D nirvana, and that’s where I want to go today.

  Hopefully all this will mean cooler graphics for you in Y2K. After all, you paid for the machine with your membership fee. All I ask from you is a little patience while I climb the learning curve.