Investing in the Future (and the Present)

Hey all..

I wanted to thank all of you again for your incredible support.  This month was a pretty good one, many retro requests and while I don't have the money yet I do know what I will spend it on.

1. 8 GB of memory

This will double my memory and allow me to use higher resolution textures and higher polygon counts.  I've been needing this for a loooong time.  Anyone who sees my work and knows anything about making 3D animation should be significantly impressed with what I've been able to pull off with only 8GB of memory.

So this will mostly come into play the next time I make a new character.  But I will be able to increase the polygon count when I render the Suki animation I am finishing up now..  So we will see some immediate benefits there.

2. NodeMeister

This is gonna get very technobabbly.. But I've had my eye on this tool for a long time.  When I saw it I said, "This thing was made just for me."

I'll explain how Lightwave currently works.  Let's say I want to flex a muscle.  The changes will be moving the base geometry and dissolving from the normal displacement map to the alternate flexed displacement map.

Currently, I would have a nodal tree for each system;  Morphing and displacement have their own node trees.  Both systems are driven by a single value, so this value will need to be called upon at the start of each node tree.

With NodeMeister, I  get a global node system.  It would be fair to say that Lightwave should have this out of the box but it just doesn't..  That's a bummer but NodeMeister fixes it.  In the global node I can reference the flexer's driving value, process it and then spit out the values to increase and decrease each value for that flex.  Then the morph and displacement system still have their own node trees, but they can simply access the global node values and then let the values from the global nodes drive both systems.

This video shows it in action: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XgCEmgV5OUA

More geeky info here: https://www.db-w.com/products/nodemeister

It streamlines the process some, and better organizes it as well.  This is something that will not come into play until a new character is made.

On top of that I will have some money left to give to my family because they want me paying rent which is completely reasonable.  But I already went into those details earlier.  Anyway.. I look forward to this "power-up" and thank you all again!!!