He-Man and Azziel in Octane (Test Pics)

The above pic is Iray (Left) vs. Octane (Right). Admittedly it's not a very fair test as the lighting in the iray version was real quick .. but even so the textures of his skin, and clothes, are just insane in the octane version.

A little (BIG) test pic I did of He-Man with Octane. After a whole week of furiously learning, rendering, crashing my computer over and over .. screaming .. learning how to calm down ... learning how to not crash the computer .. I cranked out some really delicious looking models.

You've seen the new Ryan, looking very damned sexy in glorious photorealism. And here my He-Man character .. admittedly looking a bit like a statue but that's more due to the boring pose I had him in :P.

Turns out all my crashing problems may well be due to an insufficient power supply in my PC. After all this time it never occurred to me that the reason for the occasional glitch, hang, and crash might have been due to it not getting enough juice. There's a 1300 watt PSU in this thing .. when you've got a big beast of a machine you kinda take it for granted that everythings getting fed well ... well it turns out maybe not.

So I'm looking into this as I may need to upgrade to a 1600 Watt PSU (I think that's as high as a single PC goes. Those Titan's sure do like to drink up the ol' electricity (just like Ryan's balls :P).

But frustrations aside I've been very happy learning how to make better imagery. And though I may still need to use IRAY (my old rendering software) for the meantime as it consumes slightly less power and allows things to get actually rendered without crashing a thousand times over. The cool thing is that learning Octane has taught me a LOT about using Iray again .. so I've actually gained a lot of knowledge about using what I had before and making it better. So as much as Octane will be used for simple character studies right now, in the future it will be the main rendering tool.

As for the He-Man story .. I'm working hard on new images with Octane and I'll hopefully have some updates for you soon. Me and the author have to discuss a shot list for the illustrations and all that but we're making good progress.

And finally .. the Sparkie Shock comic .. I know .. I'm dragging my ass on this, but I'm making progress. I'm still rendering frames because I realized that the finale to this scene could be even better .. and meaner .. and so I had to render a few more angles. Also just outfitted me second render PC with 32 gigs of RAM which has made that machine MUCH happier.

Thanks for reading and look out for new artwork and comic pages coming very soon.

Sparkie