Lander critique

critique

Critique time 

Taking a long break (until the following day) and returning to a project with a fresh eye is really important. There were a few things in this render that I'd missed entirely. This morning, I made a few notes before I start tackling the remaining issues. This has taken much longer than planned, which is now standard for my projects. When I started as a 3D hobbyist, I'd do quick and long projects. Quick projects were just sketches of a few minutes, while long projects could take up to three hours. Three hours! Imagine!! It was different back then. I had 16 MB of system memory and a graphics card with about 4MB. Even if you had very high standards, you would hit limits in terms of realism and detail, and to be clear, I didn't have high standards.

Today, the tools offer you near limitless artistic and photorealistic potential. It will be a question of how much time and effort you will put in and what you will accept before moving on to the next task. I think the answer comes from how patient you are and what standards you apply. I stopped doing 3D work for a long while when my standards had started to greatly exceed my skill level. Nothing I did was good enough. Looking back, it wasn't a question of skill but more about patience and care. I'm now less willing to let a bad element slide. I no longer hide bad elements in clutter. Obviously, this is all on a sliding scale. In a year, I'll have standards should be even higher, and things that I find acceptable today will not be tomorrow. Hopefully!

I really need to finish this because I have two competition submissions waiting in the wings. I will probably use the lander in one of them.

Dreams of a new system

Yesterday, NVidia announced their 500-series GPUs. My RTX 4090 is no longer king of the crop. The RTX 5090 takes that crown. I hoped to order a new system yesterday, but the release has been handled differently. It looks like a sales embargo lifts on the last day of the month, so this question will be kicked into February. I'm less confident that my chosen supplier, Scan.co.uk, will provide 5090 systems. We'll see in a few weeks. It will be a great relief to escape the technical problems of my current system. A replacement system will let me send this machine off for servicing...

Science fiction landscape test number 499! <sarcasm>