Open-source penguins, food mixers, and anime - Long post ahead!

Yep, I'm still around, still geeky, still stuck on my Audi project.

I've been slowly chipping away at the interior models, but it's proving to be rather difficult - not to mention I seem to be going through a creativity drought, and my life's been a bit hectic over the last few weeks.
As a heads-up, I also have a post about a recently completed project coming up, so keep your eyes peeled.

Anyway, on to those open-source penguins.  In other words, Linux.  I've now spent the better part of today configuring my desktop's Linux Mint 13 installation, which I had been putting off for several weeks.  In case you're wondering (or if you're forgetful, since I've posted about this before), my desktop is a Gateway with a quad-core Intel i5-2320 at 3.0GHz, 6GB of RAM, and a EVGA nVidia GeForce GTX 560TI SC GPU.
The fun part when installing Linux is that most of the time it can't use the GPU in your system when still "out-of-the-box".  You have to install the drivers for it, since Linux doesn't generally seem to be as plug-and-play as Windows 7 (which I love), which is both a pro and a con in my opinion.  The problem then becomes actually getting to the desktop interface, which is made tricky by the afore-mentioned lack of display drivers.

That of course means that even the LiveDVD versions have trouble booting up properly, which is always fun.  So in order to get around that, you have to first get to the Grub loader screen and modify the parameters for the Linux booting process.  For nVidia GPUs, there's a specific change that needs to be made which, unless you edit the grub.cfg file itself, is temporary and resets itself when you reboot.  I have no idea if this works with most common Linux distros like Ubuntu and so on, so if you're having trouble booting a Linux LiveCD/DVD or getting a newly-installed GPU working I'd recommend finding the right set of instructions for your Linux distro :)

My process, however, is as follows: when you get to the grub loader, press E over the desired option, which then brings up details concerning that particular boot process' instructions.  You should see a long line of instructions about two-thirds of the way down, which should end in the words "quiet splash", or at least have those words near the end of the string.  For an nVidia GPU (whether that's a GeForce 6200, which I had to deal with a few days ago, or a GTX560Ti, which is in my desktop) you have to change that "quiet splash" to "noacpi noapic nomodeset", which basically tells Linux to boot up without all the fancy GPU processes that require drivers.

Updated Gallery + new Audi improvements

So I've finally done a bit of cleaning up in the Gallery page, as well as a general clean-up throughout both my blog and my DeviantART gallery.  I'm trying to better showcase my best renders and projects, so as they tended to get lost among the test renders and lower-quality renders, I've removed quite a few images from both galleries.
For DeviantART, I've simply moved all the unwanted images into storage.  I'll deal with deleting them eventually, I just don't have the time at the moment.
Also concerning the new Gallery page, I've added five other shots of the Audi A5 to the list (I'll be adding them to the Audi's project page in a moment), so click the tab up top to check 'em out!

2012 Audi A5 - last updates and Render!

So, just another string of pictures!  There were 6 more updates since my last post, but they were mostly centered around tweaking and texturing.

WIP 18 - Still experimenting with materials

WIP 19 - Tweaking the model slightly

WIP 20 - More model tweaks, this time on the headlights, adding
detail on the lights themselves.

WIP 21 - More tweaking of materials.  Everything is starting to come together :)

WIP 22 - Textured calipers.

WIP 23 - The scene's coming together!

And now the final render!

The final shot was rendered on my Intel i5-2320 at 1250 samples.  Took 3 hours to churn out this 1080p image.  I'm still working on a few other shots, so I'll put those up once they're all ready and whatnot.

I think I can now say with certainty that this is my most complex project ever.  The vertex count is above 3 million at render time... anyway, now on to other projects!  I'll have a special post over the weekend about new developments, so stay tuned!

2012 Audi A5 Coupe - Update #2! (lots of pics!)

**A wild meme-face has appeared!**

(Lvl. 9001 Wy-yuno)

MeshWeaver, Y U NO POST MOAR UPDATES?!

Well, to put it simply...I was being lazy - posting on a blog is a bit more time-consuming than uploading on DeviantART, you know?

Anyway, last time I ended with WIP snapshot #04, which was a turntable render of the bodywork at it's then-current level of progress.  But...since then there have been thirteen new updates.  I'm that lazy, yes.

Geekness à la GTX560 Ti (long post!)

What's a GTX560 Ti, you may ask?  Put simply, it's awesomeness condensed into the shape of computer hardware.  Put complexly (because I can't resist talking about the details), it is the second generation of the nVidia GeForce 460 - the 400 series was replaced with the 500, so the GTX460 (apparently a very popular GPU) became the GTX560.  However, to bridge the performance gap between the 560 and the 570 (which was relatively considerable) nVidia came up with another "in-between" version, the GTX560 Ti.

Why am I talking about this particular GPU?  Well, waaaaaaay back in December 2011, I bought my current desktop PC, a Gateway DX4860 with an Intel i5-2320 processor @3.0Ghz, 6GB of 1333Mhz RAM, a DVD drive, about a dozen USB ports (you can never have too many USB ports) and finally a nVidia GeForce GT520.  Not the best card out there, truth be told - I looked it up on an benchmarking website and it was third from the bottom.

However, it was millions of times better than the GPU I have in my good-ol' laptop - an Intel 965 Express Chipset, which sometimes struggled to run even Age of Mythology - not exactly the most graphics-intensive game out there.  (I don't even know why Intel makes GPUs O_o)