New Computer

For the past 10 years (going on 11) I've almost always worked with Pentium 4 PCs at home. To offer up a little perspective, my first computer had a Pentium 4 processor. That (admittedly heavy) little IBM Netvista tower hasn't been called new since 2000, it even has documentation/readme files that talk about Y2k as if it hadn't gone by harmlessly. Anyone else remember the "What will you do in the new Millennium?" slogans?

I had to have been 10 years old at the time, so my only use for it was as a $1500 CD player. That and maybe I'd play a few rounds of spider solitaire or try to beat my Dad's pinball score. His best is 9 million, by the way...

I was surprised that any of my PCs could run photoshop, the most any of them have is 1Gb worth of RAM (the two with 512Mb might've been pushing it). Yet there doesn't seem to be much lag unless I have a few other things running, especially browsers with lots of tabs. I've yet to try having Blender open at the same time. I'm afraid to.

This one was on sale at Factory direct, but due to the specifications and the price, they were selling out like hotcakes. Within a couple days, I noticed that most locations were nearly sold out, or had no more in stock at all. For an i7 core (approximately 6 cores with hyperthreading, making it more like 12), 8Gb of RAM, and a 1 Terabyte hard drive, I'd call this a deal. 4 years ago I bought a significantly weaker machine from a local shop (only 1Gb of RAM and a 160Gb Hard Drive, though the shopkeeper threw in a monitor with the keyboard and mouse, and delivered it to my apartment).

Image taken from techngear.com

Part of the reason for the upgrade was the fact that I was beginning to dabble in 3D. Not so much as a hobby like with MikuMikuDance (my current card is much too old to handle most of the shaders in the new 'MikuMikuEffect' plugin), but for making serious works I could be proud of, maybe even show off in my portfolio along with my 2D designs and illustrations.

And it's easy to find inspiration...

Notice the design of the windows, and the way the light comes through them? Similar Gothic-esque styles and lighting appeared during parts of Twilight Princess. (The game itself was significantly darker than it's predecessors).

Probably the best part is oggling at the really big environments like this one. And just to be extra nerdy, I'll even say it slightly resembles one of the castles in the Kyo Kara Maou anime.

Go big or go home. It surely rings true here...

But the reason I enjoy large environments is because there's plenty to explore, and you won't be bored of that area as quickly as you would in say... an N64 game. From Ocarina of Time to Twilight Princess, the GameCube's added power made it possible to make Kakariko Village a significantly larger, more complex map.

The other fun thing to play around with is going to be shaders. Admittedly I don't know much about them, aside from the demo videos I've seen for MikuMikuEffect.

[MME] Water Effect
[MME] Fireworks
MMD Newcomer - Mariel [Stylized looking Water Shader]
[MME] Flash effect