… and so is the ( not entirely voluntary ) break in the development of Ara’s Tale.

Real life demands left only small amounts of time for my short, which I invested into finishing the texturing for the entry set and experiments on texturing Ara’s dress.

After returning from a 2 week vacation in croatia, I had the opportunity to spend the last weekend high up in the mountains and used the gorgeous weather to use my DSLR not only for shooting texture references but also to do some real photographing again.

I thought I’d share some of my shots here on this blog as well.

I did this the day it came out on July 16th and immediately ran into a glitch with their online shop, which their support with some help from me was able to resolve and I finally got my 15 day license.

Well at least now I know what the Mari logo stands for:

This is my computer being crushed by the resource demands of Mari

It seems, my graphic card is just too old/limited to handle the workload Mari is giving to it. It runs, but quite slowly. I have a Geforce 8500GT based card with 512MB.

I meet all the Mari system recommendations expect with the graphics card, where they recommend at least 1GB of RAM and Quadro FX cards.

Well, at least I could try out a lot of aspects of Mari and see how immensely useful this tool could be. With some considerations on workflow it is quite usable in a pipeline with blender.

The price tag of 846 EUR (including tax in the EU) , although low in comparison to Photoshop, is still too high for me, especially considering the accompanying mandatory update of my graphics hardware.

After all it was (and for 6 days still is) a great experience and leaves me with one important insight:

I will have to invest in a graphics card update.

Until now I considered my 8500GT adequate to run my applications and (old) games. With the advent of all the GPU accelerated software I think this evaluation is no longer valid.

I hope you like it the new way.

Work on Ara’s Tale has stopped now for almost 3 weeks as I am recovering from H1N1 (swine) flu and, triggered by the flu, still enduring a light pneumonia.

So, sadly it will take some time before I can resume my work on Ara’s Tale.

The transfer wasn’t trivial (for me) and I hope I have nothing screwed up.

If you encounter any problems, please report them to me.

I found out today, that the actual files uploaded to boxstr.com are displayed in my dashboard but are actually missing from their servers, so no blend files to download for the next days.

The site will be down as soon as I start the transfer.

Seems like I have to invest some money to get a reliable site.

I apologize for any inconvenience so far.

I hope they sort out the problem soon.

I have set up this site to have a platform to publish the results and insights of my projects and experiments. I intend give access to all the files used in the my projects.

I started today and set up my Showroom, where you can see my finished projects and if interested also download the blend files. The blend files are compressed and packed to include all the textures, which sometimes result in quite some big files.

During the packing process I encountered a problem with all the files, where static particles were used. All blend files created with blender prior to version 2.46 ( the old particle system) failed to load correctly into the new system. I do not know if I find the time ( or motivation ) to convert all the old files to the new system.