Weekend

 This is the last weekend before I start a new part-time menial job. While it doesn't pay enough, it will allow me to complete my commercial Blender efforts, get more products into the Blender store, and do other stuff—like my Tabletop Role-Playing Game. After a few months, I can evaluate whether I need to do an additional job to bring in more money. I will miss the comfort and security of a salary job, but I think global events will massively disrupt the next five years. I think there will be economic turmoil that will impact employment across the board. Cheerful stuff, eh?!

We will see.

Blender School: Pipework

I am always doing this wrong. Here's the right way.

1. Add a primitive plane and delete all but 1 vertex.
2. Shift+S to make the origin sit on the remaining vertex.
3. Extrude (E) the vertex in your required direction.
4. Once the frame is modelled, add bevels (Ctrl+Shift+B).
5. Convert to a curve. Adjust the Bevel to make the pipes solid.
6. Convert back to mesh and add some loops.

Voila! No more fighting to make pipe bends consistent...

Benchmarkery

RTX 5090 (Vulcan) 36s: RTX 4090 (Athena) 43s That's about a 19% uplift

RTX 5090 (Vulcan) 39s: RTX 4090 (Athena) 39s Sometimes parity!

It's clear that the 5090 does not demonstrate much higher performance in real-world applications. The extra VRAM and some higher bandwidth will nudge the 5090 ahead, but not by much. A lot has been made of the 5090's eye-watering cost, but my 4090 cost about the same on release. The difference is that I got the 4090 at the time of release, not six weeks later.

The new system comes tomorrow

 At last! Nearly six weeks after putting in my order, the new system arrives. This will allow my current system to be sent to the "shop" to be fixed. They're not enthusiastic about putting in a new CPU, so we'll start with the fact that when I shut the thing down, it won't restart without much faff.

Once it returns, I can use it as a backup/rendering machine, so I hope to get a lot more animation done as I can leave it popping out frames while I work on the new machine.

Current benchmarks

I should be able to post the new machine's GPU benchmark results tomorrow. They should see a nice jump, although nothing like the one I saw when switching from the 2080Ti to the 4090.

Benchmarky Synthetica

A synthetic benchmark gives you the equivalent of a stopwatch with a readout in microseconds. Big numbers that give you an inflated sense of the difference between two time gaps that, in reality, you wouldn't be able to identify without a stopwatch. That said, rendering is so iterative that a 10-15% performance difference can significantly gain productivity in the long run. We should be getting a double that performance boost.