0.8 Promo and 3D Stuff

Greetings!

I finally finished the promo for 0.8! As you'll probably know if you've played it, it's a scene from Val's quest, and I couldn't resist channeling a little Phoenix Wright for the image :) 

I'd hoped to get it done earlier in the week, but I had to wait on a new power supply to arrive for reasons I'll get to below. Don't worry, though, I was able to work on 0.9-related stuff during the downtime.

As I'd alluded to before, I've recently upgraded some key components on my computer. But before I tell you what I upgraded, let me tell you what prompted it. 

I use Iray, and like most renderers these days (except those for film studios), it's a GPU renderer. GPU (video card) renderers are typically faster by 10x or more than renders on even a good enthusiast-class CPU. They thus make high-quality renders practical for folks without huge workstations. They have one important limitation, though - all the stuff used by the scene must fit into your video card's memory (VRAM). If you go over that limit - by having too many things in your scene, or using too many high-resolution textures - you're kicked back to your CPU for rendering, and you'll be doing it at a snail's pace. There are some caveats, but with most GPU renderers - and especially Iray - VRAM serves as a limit on the quality and complexity of scenes you can create.

With many of the scenes I've been creating lately, I've been bumping up against this limit. On one recent image, I used 96% of my card's VRAM; I'd wanted to add a few more things, but couldn't. My previous card was a GTX 1080 Ti; it's still a great card with 11GB of VRAM. The newest top-tier gamer card - the 2080 Ti - is faster, but it also has 11GB of VRAM. That's plenty for gamers, but not really enough for my needs. Previously, the only way to get much more than this was to buy one of Nvidia's pro-line Quadro cards, which are extremely expensive. Recently, though, Nvidia came out with the Titan RTX, which is basically a souped-up 2080 Ti, but with a whopping 24GB of VRAM. It costs about double what a 2080 Ti does (which is overpriced to begin with), but it's not nearly as expensive as the equivalent Quadro. So, I squirreled away what you guys have been sending and got one.

Unfortunately, I found out I needed more system RAM to effectively use the new card, and while rendering this image, I found out my old power supply wasn't up to the task of powering the Titan during a render. So I had to upgrade that stuff, too :(  I think I should be good now, though!

The image above is the first one I've rendered with the new card, and it's something I couldn't have done on my old one. It's very nice being able to create the scenes I envision without worrying about whether adding this or that will mean I can't actually render it. I can now create images I simply wasn't able to before, and it's all because of your support. I look forward to seeing what I can make with this thing, and I hope you do too!