Still As Life

It’s times like these that I am especially glad I have already upgraded my computer.

I have been re-rendering a bunch of fractals for print at 300 dpi on A0 and A2 sized paper. Even on the new computer, in order to get them done in time to have the high res images ready for printing for the exhibition I have had to cut the quality down compared to what I usually do them at. I’m looking at 15 hours on average for a fractal that is roughly half the quality of my normal renders, though once printed this won’t be so noticeable. This also results in around 3gb of RAM being used at any one time for the render. This is for A0. A2 I am averaging around 5 hours at half the quality with around 1 gb of RAM being used at any one time.

I’m not game to try and A0 on the old computer at all. I have had an A2 size one rendering though, it has an estimated render time of 40 hours at the same quality level as on the new computer, just so you have a comparison. I have also had to limit the RAM usage on the old computer since it only has 1gb of RAM. This means that instead of rendering the entire fractal, it will render it in 5 blocks which is slower, but it’s the only way I can do it on the old one.

Rendering A0 fractals on the new computer does render it virtually useless. While they on average use 3gb of the available RAM, they push the overall RAM usage up to an average of 98%, even when I close down the majority of things. Thus it is pretty pointless to even try to do anything else on it. Since I have limited the RAM usage on the old computer, it is still usable, but since I’m not rendering anything on the laptop, it doesn’t matter and I may as well let Apophysis have as much of the CPU time as possible.

While my laptop should do a reasonable job of rendering the fractals, since it is roughly half as powerful as Quadzilla (my Macbook Pro is a Core 2 Duo with 2gb of RAM, Quadzilla is a Core 2 Quad with 4gb of RAM), but I need the laptop to be usable all the time for uni and so on.

I would love to render all my fractals at these resolutions, but also at the quality I normally do them at. I’m thinking I’ll pick up another 4gb of RAM soon, though probably not for another fortnight or so since I have rent next weekend and the prints of these fractals are going to cost $56 each. If I get the extra RAM, that should make the computer usable whilst rendering, which means that it will be a lot easier for me to do them like this. Until then though, I could just limit the RAM usage to half and it should also be fine. I’ll just have to have a play around with it once these ones for the exhibition are done.

For those who have only seen my first fractal animation, the one I will be showing on Wednesday is a newer one that I did around September 2007. I also did the audio track for this one.

Popularity: 22% [?]

As some people may have already heard, I have art being displayed at the Infusion and Defusion events over the next week. Infusion and Defusion are the opening and closing parties of the Fusion Festival that runs from the 12th to the 16th.

The Fusion Festival is a networking and skills development festival through workshops in various areas of the creative industries and so on.

The opening night party, Infusion, will be taking place at 6pm at the Woodward Theatre in L block at Kelvin Grove QUT on the 12th of March. I will have an animation running there during the night.

The closing night party, Defusion, will be held at 7pm at the Cement Box Theatre at St Lucia UQ on the 16th of March. I will have a series of still prints exhibited here in large scale.

For more information on the Fusion Festival have a look at the website.

Popularity: 14% [?]

For one of my subjects for my Bachelor of Creative Industries, KKB210: Computational Arts 1, we are required to setup a blog to use to store our work in a website portfolio. We are allowed to use any system that sends an RSS feed and is able to receive them, similar to the way the RSS widget in WordPress works. WordPress is the recommended system and there is of course space provided on the servers at uni for it. These WordPress based blogs are accessible from off campus, but I figure, since it’s meant to be a portfolio, I may as well set it up somewhere else so that I can continue to use it elsewhere. The other benefit of this is that it doesn’t take up space on my drive at uni which I’m always getting notices about telling me that my drive is full etc.

We are allowed to set it up elsewhere, or even use an old blog if we have one, as long as our KKB210 work can be easily distinguished from everything else. I decided to buy a new domain and host it myself, why not. I’m setting it up on www.matthewbrown.net.au, no reason not to. There isn’t anything of note there yet, just an under development page. WordPress has been installed, but I haven’t finished the template yet, so it is staying invisible for now.

So there you go. This subject so far is proving to be very interesting. I’m liking it a lot.

Popularity: 20% [?]

This wouldn’t show up in the RSS feed, but if you have looked at the site in the past 10 hours or so, you would have noticed that there is now a fractal background in each post page.

It is based on one of my fractal wallpapers. This is something I have been contemplating doing for a while, to add a bit more to the page. It is a little large, approximately 440k, since the entire image is a semi-transparent png. I’m thinking about changing it to a jpg and giving it a fixed background colour so that it’s not so big, though I do prefer the semi-transparent png, but you get that.

Popularity: 6% [?]

Okay, as I mentioned before that I had fixed the margins, they are definitely fixed and working in everything now.

I have also fixed the comment boxes so they are now aligned to the left rather than the centre as Tim suggested. I forgot to have a look at these since I am almost always logged in and don’t actually see them, so thanks Tim.

I have also fixed the first post on the index page always being a fixed length unless the post is longer than the length. I was having trouble figuring out the cause of this since it only started happening after adding the Adsense code, but it only happened on the index page, not on any other pages. It turns out it was just a simple clear: both; style on a div at the end of the post text that is only present on the index page. I’m not sure why I originally put it in there, but removing it seems to have fixed it all up without causing any problems.

On another note, something that’s not a fix, I have added a 2050×1680 section to the fractal gallery. I’ve never rendered fractals this big before, in part because the time it used to take was simply not worth it since I had no use for them anyway, but really, seeing them this big is stunning. Thanks again to Tim for suggesting doing them at higher resolutions.

There is only one fractal in there at the moment, but more will follow soon enough.

Enjoy.

Popularity: 7% [?]