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Who’s Ready to Meet Our (New Render) Maker?!
🕑 Added 2023-09-15 17:59:29 +0000 UTCHey, hey, hey and Hi-Hi, one and all! Time we touched base again with y’all and damn do we have a happy-ass post for us and y’all today! This one’s borderline historic for us as it’s the first time we’ve got some ripping new hardware to crow about… Yes indeed, for those that didn’t read the goals for this month hereyet, or haven’t been around our Discord, we’ve finally got ourselves the very machine to make all our x-rated goodies again as well as shepherd us into a whole new future too! Yup, things are turning around for us, so let’s get into some lovely stuffs!
The last of our parts finally arrived this time last week, and so we’re ready to build our first ever beast of a machine! More on that in short order, but first let’s have a quick status report on the state of the game before we put that behind us for a post’s worth of time.
AoH Progress
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We had to put AoH on a quick pause for a week or so once it became clear our push for a second loan amount worked out and we could jump right into seizing the parts we needed. Instead of putting hours into the remaking of a single image or two (as was the rate at which our Ol’ Creaky was decaying), we put the time to better use backing up and readying assets for transfers. If you’ll remember one of our attempts to keep the old machine in working order backfired on us and corrupted a number of files, so doing our best to recover was the point of order until we got our new PC together.
Now that we’ve got set up again (Post Spoiler, Sorry!), it’s back to work on Natasha, at a speed much faster than our old machine could have handled in it’s final days. This last week was mostly spend on said file transfers, programming installs, and bric-a-brac new PC admin, but we’ve got Daz open and rendering again. That file corruption hit we took a few weeks back means we’d lost about 20-30 renders at the end of the upcoming version (you know, the best parts…), which we still need to recoup, and there’s some file damage we still need to assess/fix too. First up will be Unity’s files needed for the builds, which it the top priority there.
As a short aside, things like the clothing damage system we built, and was seen here:
As well as somethings Noemi, like her car washing wet t-shirt:
Those are prime examples of the things we’ve got to remake… But we made them once, and we’ll make them again, easy enough. First up though, those Natasha renders and the assets affected there!
TL;DR Long story short here is that we’re putting our new baby to work on Natasha already and we expect it to be ready to see her first official game outputs in short order. We’ll do a deeper dive on that next week after we’ve had a chance to get the gears grinding again and a full stock of things to fix/been fixed. We’re still aiming for the end of September to be released, so of we go, right after this bit of tech sexy!
Our New PC
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We know from Discord we’ve got a fair few tech-heads among us, so let’s bask in the good news and all the shiny-shiny, as Unshi himself talks you through the what’s and the why’s of each part… Skip to the end know if all you want is to see her all put together!
Take it way then, Art Dept!
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Motherboard: Z690 Force Wifi.
Been monitoring several models for a while (around 2 months) and still wasn't sure if I was gonna go for an intel or an AMD. I knew I wanted a mid-tier motherboard enough to get all the components I needed in and no more but the decision was made for me when the one I have was put on the market one day for less than half the price it is now. It was an offer I could not pass since it was a high tier MB more than capable of supporting everything I could ever throw her so it force me to go with Intel.
CPU: I5-13600KF
The CPU is clearly the bottleneck on this PC if we are looking for one and clearly the first one to be upgraded should I ever decide to do so. I went cheap with this one, functional and cheap, for several reasons. First and foremost, this is a work pc, not a gaming one, and since my work is mainly Daz3D (Daz being a single-threaded application) plus I expect never to render through CPU ever again it made no sense to go for a more expensive CPU than the bare minimum. Second reason is power consumption and temperatures. Having a big fat card as I do already consumes a TON of power and rises the overall temperature of the case, going for a less demanding CPU should ease on the fans and the power consumption.
Watercooler AOI: Deepcool LT720
There's plenty of options when it comes to cooling down your pc and none are wrong, it mostly depends on what you're willing to sacrifice to get the end result. My main consideration was noise. Again, this is not a gaming PC so noise is important since 99% of the time I'll be using it without headphones. Having a noisy air-cooling system wasn't an option and the Watercooler AIO have been the norm for a while now when it comes to good alternatives in terms of cooling systems. The LT720 has received very high scores and has an impressive set of fans (so much so that replacing them for the new and improved Lian-Li SL120 V2 fans as I originally intended would mean making them worse) so it was never much of doubt for me. Having some kick-ass fans I could leave at minimum speeds (so no noise) when working and get them spinning fast when rendering is a dream scenario.
GPU: MSI GeForce RTX 4090 Suprim
One of the hardest decisions of my work life. I originally aimed for the Gygabite RTX 4070ti Gaming OC and to be fair it would've been "fine", especially since we’ve been wringing out everything from a now 6-year-old 1080ti. Problem is... fine is what we've had for years now and we were not aiming for "fine" with this one. Jumping to the RTX4080 meant an increase in terms of price of around 50% to 75% while the increase in quality wasn't on par. Again, this is a Daz3D (and other rendering programs like Blender) oriented PC and what we were getting for the price difference wasn't enough to rock my world honestly. Just a bit more V-Ram, Cuda Cores and not even close to a 50% speed improvement... nah, not worth it. It's also worth mentioning that depending on the brand the card is made (IE MSI, Gygabite, PNY, etc) it has different fan configurations, V-Ram speeds, build materials, etc so jumping to the 4070Ti to the 4080 meant comparing one of the best built 4070Ti against one of the cheapest 4080s for a 50% increase in price.
Once again the solution presented itself. I started monitoring the 4070ti, 4080 and 4090 and making a list of good and bad and prices for them in different stores in an excel hoping that something would just get out of the charts for no reason... and boy it did. The MSI 4090 Suprim is a beast. One of the best cards you can get out there but it’s expensive, very, very expensive. Surprisingly one day it popped up green in my excel at a whooping 40% less than it is usually sold for and I got it, couldn't even think about it. To be fair its still twice as expensive as the 4070Ti would've been but its on par (if not cheaper) with the higher tier 4080s.
Power Supply Unit: MSI MPG A1000G Gold
With great power comes great power consumption so we had to go a tier higher here too. PSUs, contrary to what one may think, are not that hard to choose since they make the decision for you pretty much. I needed one of the new and big PSUs for the new 600W cables they come with (otherwise my card can't be powered) and I needed guarantees that my PC wouldn't burn up in case of overpower or other electrical issues. When it comes to brands I had my eyes in the Gigabyte and the MSI (both Gold and full modular) for the reasonable price vs quality. I ended up with the MSI just to keep it all under the same brand cause I had no preference between one or the other.
Hard Drives (SSD + HDD): WD Black SN850x 1TB - SSD M.2 (no radiators), WD Black SN770 2TB - SSD M.2 (no radiators), Seagate Barracuda 8TB - Sata3 7200RPM
SSDs and HDDs are mostly a matter of preference but there are a few brands that stay as "standards" when it comes to price vs quality. Western Digital has been a reliable brand for years now and Samsung has been getting their foot more and more as a standard when it comes to SSDs. I've been working with a Samsung EVO and a Samsung PRO SSD in my old PC for a long time now and I decided to change to Western Digital. I'm not particularly happy with the Samsungs after years of work (not extremely mad either though) so I thought I'd give the WD a try see how they perform in stress situations for years. The HDD was an easy choice, I need a lot of space to make internal backup and save data temporarily until its moved to where it belongs but I don’t care if the data transfer is fast or slow cause I can leave it copying while I’m sleeping so I went for the biggest one at a reasonable price I could get. The Barracudas are ideal for that. Mediocre yet reliable and big HDDs, pretty much a file cabinet inside my computer.
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And all that technobabble adds up to one grand sum…
…. Dat-da-da-da!!!
Our new render machine, to last us the next half-decade! Name: Still TBD! Maybe y’all can help?
That’s the contents of our post pretty much covered. What we can’t yet quantify is just how much awesome this will allow us to bring to bear on Agents of Heels, Noemi’s Toscana Rebirth, our comics and smaller projects… Pretty much every other thing to come next too!
For those non-techie people here, suffice it to say we’re super pumped, and we’ve high hope this new beast will be the thing to firstly pull us out of the rut this year has been, and slingshot us into much better places. It’s too early to make wise promises (though early tests with the machine are damn stunning even to us), but we’ve got some ideas in mind that’ll help us get up to speed with our own new-found power that’ll mean fun for all beWildernauts, then we’ll make to transitioning all that into even better games. More on that a little later though, we’ve still got a lot of outstanding promised to make good on… And now we can again at last!
See y’all around the Discord and back again here next week so, but until then (while we’ll be whipping the drool off our chins)…
Be all hard(ware) for our future and beWilder!
Comments
Azra El Crackhead
Dats cute 🤭
