*sigh* Well, here it is ...

Herei s my first project forthis term for my Intermediate 3D Art class. I *sigh* because it is not as good as I wanted. I actualyl had it looking like something straight from a movie, with sharp crisp colors and detail, but ... when I went to go render my walk through (rendering being where I make a picture of each of the 600 steps it would take to walk around my church), the program crashed due to not enough memory (ram). The first thing I though was that the last item I had placed in my scene was what crashed it. It was some very nice atmospheric lighting coming down from the stained glass window up in the balcony, with shaded lights flowing down with it, but I decided to do some tweaking first to see if I could keep things together. Well ... I went to go renderit and it said it would take over 80 hours to render ... ACK!!! Well ... I decided that for the sake of a great project, I would let it go. I watched it render the first shot, and it went through, so I went to bed (did I mention it was 3 a.m.?). WHen I got up, I was very disappointed to find that it had crashed again ... on shot 2!!!. Arggggghhhh! 8hrs wasted! So ... I made a few more tweaks, this time taking out the beautiful atmospheric light I had, and it said it would render in about 70 hours. Not too bad ... but this time it crashed on shot 8! GGGGGRRRRRRRRRRR! Soooooo ... I had to tweak it even MORE, and finally ended up with this ... the colors are bland and washed out, and where it looked like a movie, it now looks like a video game.

The issue was that I have an older computer. Don't get me wrong ... it was great when I got it 3 years ago ... but computers become obselete in 2 years it seems. I have a Dell computer with an Athalon 2 processor, 225 gb hard drive, 256 mb video card, and 3 gigs of ram upgradable to 6. So ... as I really REALLY need a new computer to get my school work done, and get it done in a manner that is great and amazing ... my wife and I decided to get me a new computer. But (and there is ALWAYS a but ...) we do not get our bonuses until later on this month and at the end of May). Thankfully, my parents are loaning us the money (THANK YOU SO VERY VERY MUCH) so that I can get me a new computer. I will be ordering an ASUS system that has an Athalon 7 processor, 9 gigs of ram upgradable to 24 gigs, a 1 tb hard drive, and a video card that has 856mb. This is awesome, but (ANOTHER but ...) the down side is that I need to order all new software again, because my software will only load onto one system :-(. This will be a long process and I hope to have everything up to spec and ready to go by the time my next term starts.

Once I get my new system and everything up to snuff ... the very first thing that I will do is get everything back up to the way it was before I started tweaking and put that beautiful light back ... and I will then render it and dedicate it to Mom and Mike for their help with this. For the time being, I hope that you enjoy what I have here.

I love you all and I thank you immensely for all of your support!