A little Idea. Reviews!

[The Duke]

I’m sort how tos could be included. You never know they may learn something new.

 

Also did i mention  my idea about a side section of this, up-cycled tech/gear. I line the idea of long “dead” hardware getting a new lease of live. Eg a phone now as a door screen or simply an android phone solely used to control microprocessor.

 

[D-Dan]

OK, I’ve put together a scene. I’ve reused a couple of assets from a much more complex project. It’s simply a couch in the corner of the room.

I deliberately chose them because the complex shaders make it a decent test. It will require blender 2.79 (with denoising and the principled shader – ie. the latest release version).

On my main rig, with GPU rendering it takes around 3.5 minutes (newer NVidia cards will chew through it faster).

On my aging HP6710b laptop, core 2 duo mobile without a dedicated GPU well, it’s still going, but ETA is around 1.7 hours.

The advantage is RAM usage is around 180 Mb so any modern(ish) machine should handle it on memory.

Shall I upload?

 

EDIT: Probably worth adding it’s all my own original work, so no danger of copyright infringement.

EDIT2: I can probably find an older version that doesn’t use the principled shader if anyone is afraid of upgrading an existing blender installation. I’ve only converted this week and have 18 previous saves.

Arch Linux, on a Ryzen 7 1800X, 32 GB, 5 (yes -5) HDs inc 5 SSDs, 4 RPi 3Bs + 1 RPi 4B - one as an NFS server with two more drives, PiHole (shut yours), Plex server, cloud server, and other random Pi stuff. Nice CoolerMaster case, 2 x NV GTX 1070 8GB, and a whopping 32" AOC 1440P monitor.

[The Duke]

Christ youre quick, I was just spit balling ideas.

[D-Dan]

I don’t waste time. On the C2D in the laptop, the end result will be around 1h 10m, which is still a massive increase on GPU rendering, but not so bad that it can’t be used as a test. Next post is the scene and details for setting it up for CPU only rendering. Image textures are packed into the file, so it should be immediately useable.

Even if your idea doesn’t take off, it’s a handy benchmark lighter on resources than the standards (especially on RAM).

Arch Linux, on a Ryzen 7 1800X, 32 GB, 5 (yes -5) HDs inc 5 SSDs, 4 RPi 3Bs + 1 RPi 4B - one as an NFS server with two more drives, PiHole (shut yours), Plex server, cloud server, and other random Pi stuff. Nice CoolerMaster case, 2 x NV GTX 1070 8GB, and a whopping 32" AOC 1440P monitor.

[D-Dan]

OK here’s the scene. Samples are still lowish at 500 but I assume at least de-noising. If rendering on CPU only on the render settings (the camera icon) scroll to performance and set tile size to 32 or 64. As a general rule large tile sizes for GPU rendering and small for CPU rendering.

Damn the file is too big even when zipped. (5.9 Mb).

 

Wonder if RSB will give me dispensation for this?

In the meantime https://www.dropbox.com/s/l2nmhn7zlsxwlll/couch.zip?dl=0

 

Arch Linux, on a Ryzen 7 1800X, 32 GB, 5 (yes -5) HDs inc 5 SSDs, 4 RPi 3Bs + 1 RPi 4B - one as an NFS server with two more drives, PiHole (shut yours), Plex server, cloud server, and other random Pi stuff. Nice CoolerMaster case, 2 x NV GTX 1070 8GB, and a whopping 32" AOC 1440P monitor.

[RSB]

As promised albeit a wee bit later a proper reviews section here and also found under “Other – Members Everyday Reviews”.  It is basic with the features needed but I can modify it if people want to add some ideas for example other fields, different rating system and so on. The reviews area is for anything. This can be Everyday products and services.

Americans: Over Sexed, Over Payed and Over here, Wat Wat!

[Ed P]

Dan – do a Blender modelling tutorial and I’m your fan!

Lee – on the review front, we do not buy full-blown PCs/Laptops very often but we do buy accessories, phones and software/apps, games on a fairly regular basis and there isn’t an easy ‘one-size fits all’ way of organizing files.

To check whether something has already been reviewed will need a standard for tagging or something. Incidentally I guess that a forum user just uses the ‘search’ button for looking up tags or is there another way? e.g. PC Accessory, USB, Sound Card, Cheap – how would I use tags to find an entry?

[RSB]

<p style=”text-align: left;”>@edps Well there will be a search facility same as the forum but just reviews which will search products/services reviewed. I will be adding categories once I decide what they are or no doubt add to them as things are reviewed.</p>
Tags may also be put in there to.

@d-dan Sorry I missed your request in the above post from October. I think some blender Tut’s in the blog area would be good ? if you if have some time. ?

Americans: Over Sexed, Over Payed and Over here, Wat Wat!

[Ed P]

” I will be adding categories once I decide what they are or no doubt add to them as things are reviewed”

Sorry, I was not very clear. Imo it will be difficult/impossible to think of all the categories for accessories. A tag system has a little extra value in being more flexible but obviously needs more grunt in having synonyms in the tag field search i.e sound card=sound=audio!=music. A hierarchical file system is better but will take a lot of effort and have empty fields, it may be easier to put the onus on the taggers to use the best terms.

Games are easier – you can just pinch the record names from Gog’s database structure!

[RSB]

I will take your views on-board and see what can be done. I will be keeping it simple though as I am trying to do with the rest of the site. The search is intelligent enough to allow people to search for previous reviews and review titles, tags and descriptions will be monitored to ensure the search can do it’s thing. If for some reason there is a jump in the number of reviews I can then review 🙂 the situation again.

The emphasis on forumite going forward is to provide some useful tools but keep it at a some what basic level or at-least basic, simple and clean on the face of it. I don’t know about others but for example places like Facebook I find I can never find anything especially in these for sale groups. I go to the page one minute, spot something then try to come back to it 10 mins later and it’s gone.

I totally want to avoid the mayhem of what these social networks do and this encourages me to keep it simple but do the job. Plus there is only me to repair things when it goes wrong so the less the better. I still have a long list to do, new registration form, forum rules and so on.

Americans: Over Sexed, Over Payed and Over here, Wat Wat!

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