The main reason I’ve decided to upgrade my work station was the fact I’m exploring 3D and animation fields from not long time. It’s mainly architectural visualizations and post-productions. Softwares from these fields are much more demanding than silly digital painting ones, in which you technically and mostly, place brush strokes in certain places and with certain colour :-) Although, this upgrade made digital painting somewhat more comfortable.

Processor. Previously it was a dual core, Core2Duo E8500, with 3.4 GHz clock. Worked very fine for 2D. Now it’s a Sandy Bridge 2600K. I didn’t want to buy six core monsters with 2.5 to 3 times bigger prices. Sandy Bridge are very well known for low heat processing and large overclocking possibilities. Good cooler, some time for fine tuning BIOS settings and you have a CPU with performance close to those six core processors. Despite 2600K having two cores less, the high clocks compensated it nicely. I’ve managed to over clock it from default 3.4GHz to 4.8GHz and compared the performance – the results are written later.

The cooler is Prolimatech Megahalems. Quite big and well-made. One of top coolers and pretty expensive. With one very fast and noisy fan, I’ve got temperatures of 4.8GHz 1.39V CPU under 70*C. With medium fan’s speed, I expect to have a bearable noise and still decent temperatures with highly over clocked CPU – that was the point of buying this cooler. But it won’t happen until I finish building homemade case, which is bigger and going to have a case ventilation. My actual case is very small and inside is pretty cramped, hence high fan speed.

Motherboard – not a big brainer, it had to be based on P67 chipset. Number of internal and external connectors for USB , SDD, HDD and other devices had to be enough to plug all I have and give a little room for future devices. Overclocking stability was considered – it’s mostly about checking how far people went with their processors on motherboard you’re interested in and averaging their results and comments. I’ve chosen Asrock P67 Extreme4 – in my opinion it had features I needed: good overclocking, very nice price, lower about 20-40$ in comparing to similar motherboards from other companies. Quite few things have changed in computers since my last upgrade in 2007 year. At least in P67 chipsets, the north bridge was integrated with CPU. Meaning CPU isn’t used only processing, but managing devices as well. There’s also a integrated GPU in CPU, but since I’m using graphic card, it’s automatically disabled.

Graphic card are important for boosting previews – in my case, After Effects compositions and 3D renderer previewer. Nowadays, a lot of software developers focus intensely on enhancing GPU accelerated previews and sometimes production renders. I haven’t changed card, since GTX285 was working fine for me and stronger card would require new power supply with higher wattage, which was beyond my desired cost plan. I remember choosing power of PSU was an always confusing matter in computer forums – most of people would suggest PSU’s that are 100-200 watts stronger than needed because they didn’t have much real world experiences. My watt meter clearly shows how much power my computer draws from socket – with intense 3D rendering, it usually peaks at 270W (only CPU is working), and when only GPU is working, like in previews, I think it’s around 250W. With heavy games, it’s 300-380W since they use both CPU and GPU, hence high power consumption. My Corsair VX 450W PSU is perfectly fine, no need for 500-600W monsters.

Storage devices. I puzzled with it a quite time. I had to think what improvements I needed and predict a little my future work flow. I’ve decided to use three various discs for various goals. For Windows (or generally, operating system), I gave a SSD, Crucial C300 128GB. Because of very quick access time (0.1-0.2ms in comparing to 13-16ms of mechanical drives), it works best for large number of files, especially for OS’s and big softwares. Just multiply these delay times by dozens/hundreds/thousands and you get the idea. Launch times of all programs got significantly reduced, from 30% to 60% and the workflow has become more dynamic and responsive. I feel it.

Second drive is actually a RAID0 array consisting of two Samsung F3 1TB 7200RPM. With RAID0 mode, it resulted with doubled read and write transfers. Single Samsung had 115MB/s average read, with RAID0, it’s 215MB/s. It works as main work disc – this is where I store all my files related to 2D and 3D works, such as Photoshop files, textures, photo references, animation frames etc. Why RAID? Because I work a lot with big Photoshop files with size of hundreds of MBs. The bigger sequential read (or average read), the faster loading in editing software or image viewer. Which is very convenient if you have bunch of them, like WIP files. Boy, that was a nice improvement, 2-3 times faster opening.

But RAID0 has disadvantages. One biggest would be higher chance for data loss – if one disc gets broken down, it goes same for whole RAID array, even if there are other working discs. Because of that, I’ve decided to buy a low performance, cheap HDD solely for backup. I’ve chosen a Samsung F4 EcoGreen 2TB 5400RPM. Lower rotation speed means theoretically longer lifespan. Higher space density means less disc platters and lesser risk of mechanical failure. I’ve calculated as well that, for my surprise, it’s a lot more cheap for archiving than DVD+R discs! 2TB (1,83TB in real world usage) is equal to ~420 DVDs. To match price of this HDD and 420 DVDs, one DVD had to cost so low that you could buy only low-quality brand. And from my experience, low-quality DVD means shorter longevity and very high chance for DVD burning failure – about 20-40%. Also, usually DVDs has shorter lifespan and it’s not fun to see that after few years DVD has problems with reading content – it happened to me few times.

Now it’s time for comparing performances between actual rig and previous one. First times are from before update, later from actual work station. I did measure with stopwatch, so accuracy should be around +/- 1 second.

Opening Photoshop CS5:  15 seconds vs 4 seconds (thanks to SSD loading bunch of small program files)

Opening big PSD file, 916MB, 12000 x 7500 pixels resolution and ~28 layers: 67 seconds vs 8 seconds (thanks for high RAID0 ~215MB/s sequential read. It could be faster if I used SSD for storing actual projects, as it has ~345MB/s, but RAID0 is enough for me)

Scaling PSD from above, from 12000 pixels width to 4921 pixels: 146 seconds vs 22 seconds (I’m not sure what’s used for this processing, but I guess  disc drives play major role)

Scaling PSD from 4921 pixels back to 12000pixels: 74 seconds vs 12 seconds

Rotating image with 28.76 degrees: 5 minutes and 12 seconds on 80-90 MB/s 7200RPM Samsung HDD vs 42 seconds

Opening 3DS Max 2010: 75 seconds vs 14 seconds (again, thanks for SSD)

Rendering the 3D scene with vray: 38 minutes vs 6 minutes (Sic! That’s where highly over clocked multi core CPU shines brightly)

That’s all. Hope you’re finding it helpful.

I’d like to explain a little what and why I’ve customised blog design. Perhaps some of you remember the previous blog platform I was using, Google’s Blogger. I was using there the default theme called Minima. It was using classic layout – header at the top, content column at left side and sidebar at right side. It was beautiful and minimalistic, but I’ve decided to re-design it mainly for better reading experience. The changes and reasons are:

1). I wanted to match blog appearance to my portfolio site. It makes them both unified and easier to recognize whose site belongs to. I’m planning to print business cards as well, rather for fun – I’ll blog it once I print them. I suppose the graphic industry calls it as ‘identification design’ – sounds so “oooh”‘y ;)

2). I wanted to play with design and try to make it more unique. And I love typography designs, which resulted the header you can see at the top of blog. It’s rather simple and allows reader to figure out easily what site is, who’s author and what’s expected content. Combining functions with simple and nice form is pretty challenging for me. For successful combination, I believe a few things are needed. You need experience as user and think what you need, annoys you and makes you happy. Leave alone only needed things and wipe out the rest. Even if detail is a little thing, a bunch of them becomes noticeable. In my example, I disabled the sidebar. I came to conclusion it isn’t so useful. Want to learn more about me? Check portfolio. Want to see links? Click “Links” in menu. These informations are mostly seen one, maybe two times and once they’re no longer used, they hangs in place, consuming important screen place – especially if you’re using a small laptop or notebook. The disabled minor details would be author’s name at post title (I’m the only author, so not much for guessing :), hours of post creation (I can’t imagine why reader would be interested in this) and similar useless informations. After disabling a sidebar, I’ve thought about another thing…

3). … which was about layout of post content. Majority of blogs have thumbnails that are small and can be loaded quickly. Every time you wanted to see a fully zoomed image, you had to click a thumbnail. But if you were on blog that contains mainly photos or artworks, you would have to click a lot (assuming that viewer likes them, but I think that in practice, there are only two possible outcomes – either you like whole blog and visit from time to time or don’t like and never visit after the first time). From usability point of view, it’s wasting time on clicking thumbnails and eating hosting bandwidth, because every work has two images – thumbnail and higher resolution version. I’ve changed it so you simply open the blog and scroll with mouse to see images in fairly large resolutions – mostly 1000px width. If there are bigger pictures, like sheets of WIPs, 1000px “thumbnails” will be used, though I assume it’s going to be used rarely. Some posts with very long texts will be cut with ‘Read on…’ links, so there’s no excessive scrolling. There’s still a pagination for blog pages. I was considering installing a plugin to disable it – with that, you would have to only scroll, and blog would automatically load older pages. But I scraped this idea because I felt the user wouldn’t have much idea where she/he is, even if plugin is developed enough to show page number when scrolling.

I think that’s all. I must admit for quite time I haven’t played with web designs – lately I’ve did newsletters themes for contest (in which I didn’t win anything :) and since they had to be displayed correctly in various web and software mail clients, there was a lot of jumbling with code – pretty challenging and satisfying. Another project is web site for personal project. It remains hidden unless the project is finished. Nevertheless, being able to make sites and learning graphic design is very useful for presentation purposes in digital era. It comes handy even in my illustration – either presenting concepts or graphic novels/comics.

Also, I would like to congratulate fellow countryman Piotr JabÅ‚oÅ„ski, who won in Digital Painting category with his ‘Dreamsworld’ work.

Below you can see my winning entry.

In Blogger, with Layout type theme, all empty lines were done with <br /> attributes. No matter what’s before and after them, they were used just to make empty lines. That’s a non-semantic way – the proper way is to wrap texts or objects in correct attributes – for example, if you have a paragraph, wrap it between <p> and </p> attributes – that’s for what they are. Then define in CSS how different attributes relate to each. Want a gap between paragraphs? Just set right margin.

The most gruesome thing I’ve been encountering when using Blogger, was aligning images. The most common problem I had were texts “swimming” by side of images, while I wanted them to be under or above images. In such cases, I had to remove useless <br />’s, or experiment with image CSS styles like a monkey, or simply re-write post from scratch. Or, if you did write a neat post with text and images in right places, published it and then noticed you duplicated a image, then after replacing it with another image, you can expect a layout collapse.

This problem was actual when I started using Blogger (and I’ve used it for almost two years) and this time I thought the developers would solve this issue. Wrong. It didn’t happen. Almost all of my posts are combinations of texts and images and I’ve had enough with tedious fixing new posts. I’ve said to WordPress “sorry pal, can I return to you” and moved to a new house. I feel a lot better there. Everywhere is clean, the code structure is minimalistic and built with logic – I feel like a fish in a code. In Blogger, there was only dirt and chaos – I didn’t know where was put and for what some things were.

Also, since WordPress is made in much clearer and simpler way, it means better searchers results.

Plus, there’s a gallant library of plugins. I’ve found few very useful ones and those are:

1). Broken Link Checker
As name implies, it will check links on your blog to see if they leads to somewhere. If some of them don’t, you will be noted in your admin panel. Very useful if you don’t wan’t waste time on blog quality check and if there’s a lot of links.

2). Google XML Sitemaps
This plugin will automatically generate XML sitemap of your blog. It’s like a real map – you instantly know how terrain looks and what’s there. Usually searcher bot looks through your blog, but that takes some time. With sitemap, bot will know how your blog is structured, resulting faster indexing. It’s useful for good search results (I suppose there might be more indexed posts and quicker response to new posts).

3). Maintenance Mode
If you’re editing, for example, a theme – you better to tell visitors about it. It will block access and leave a nice message explaining why and, optionally, when access block will be removed.

4). WPtouch
When plugin detects that mobile phone is browsing your blog, it will automatically enable theme for small screen. It will save time on zooming and panning – no need for that. Everything is fitted nicely for small resolutions and mobile theme buttons make navigating really easy. I’ve made two screenshot from iPod touch, so you can see how it looks in real:

5). ALT Checker
If you’re managing a images oriented blog, you’ll need it. ALT attribute which is inserted into IMG tag, is one of only two ways to tell searcher bots what images are about. The second way is a filename. But if you name a image with sketch12_13th_November_2010.jpg, there’s no way bot would figure out what about sketch is – bots don’t have eyes. If you don’t want to change file names for sake of work flow, like me, you have to add ALT attributes and write short descriptions. For example, with image above, it would be “mechanized swat assault”.  With image files easy to read, search bots will nicely index images to graphic searchers (which are about 60-70% of incoming sources in my case!).

Also, I’ve noticed in my profile statistics that there was already front page-featured work and I was surprised. I’ve missed it. Before yesterday’s upload, there was only one work and I suppose that’s one which got featured – Winter. Long time ago, it was a entry for IT’S ART’s contest titled “When We Left Earth”

Thanks, IT’S ART, it made my day :)

First, I would like to announce the face lift of my portfolio site. More minimalism and lighter theme. Also, this blog was redesigned to match the portfolio as well. There are some blog layout bugs that I want to correct or improve, but for this moment, I’m pretty happy with results. Also, there are some new works in portfolio – check it!

If you encounter some layout problem and you were earlier on portfolio or blog, hit Refresh to flush out the web browser cache.

Okay, time for posting images. Six new illustrations and WIPs.

Samurais

The progress:

Linear perspective sci-fi panorama

The progress

Trolls attacking some mountain village

The progress

Skyscraper

The progress

Not sure what this is...

Another sci-fi city:

The progress

That's all for illustrations. Now, speedpaintings!

Mafia theme speedpaintings:

Making of in video (Vimeo)

Making of in video (Vimeo)