Game in the Brain

I plan to use the skills I’m gaining in blender to help the company. Beginning with migrating to a blender render farm instead of the limited Auto-desk farm. With a blender render farm, we can basically tap all the computers in the office to help in the rendering, instead of the limitation of 10 computers to an auto-desk render farm.

I’m helping the company get into blender by being the one with the skills to train and cheapen our overhead in this department.

But I’ve hit a barrier. Its easier to learn if I can sample my works fully rendered, and to do that I have to move from a 3500+400 passmark system to a 4500+3500 system (which has about 2 more 3500 passmark slots for additional Graphic Cards; I need an overspeck ). Despite being 3500 windows 8 is crap and handicaps my system. I freaking have my 2 CPU 1100 passmark Laptop keeping pace through Xubuntu.

I kept windows 8 for my steam account, but now it seems there is less reason for me to stay on Windows 8. I think I should list the reasons down, so that when there is nothing stopping me anymore I will reformat this and migrate to Xubuntu (I need all the processing power I can get limited to my skill level with the OS).

Such a computer would set me back almost 2.5k or $60 USD a month for 2 years. I should be able to make money enough to justify and have it pay for itself. I am migrating the company systems to blender, I could use the hardware.

When I first was the company’s 3d artist I overdid it a project and spend about 350k php (5 quad core computers) on hardware plus 200k on a 3ds max license php. Then I burned out, but we had the other engineers and 3d graphics people do the renderings. We now provide 3d rendered mock ups as part of our service. There is no “good” credit to be had in the situation, salvaging the equipment was the best thing to do.

So I’m really pondering this monthly expense seriously: will it add value, will it cut costs, will it pay off soon enough that the loss would not be too great????