Knittingmommy's Laboratory

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  • Glad you safe!  Your cat is too funny!  We have an area in Ohio that is more prone to tornados than the rest of Ohio.  Zanesville was almost wiped out some years back.  Its very strange, you drive through town and there is a very clear deliniation between the older historical buildings that survived and the new ones that went up to replace the ones that the tornado wiped out.  Lots of death's there as well.  So sad.  I'm fortunate that the area of Ohio that I live in is not as prone as others.    Its very strange but the storms seem to split around us a lot of the time. 

    I didn't realize you were in Ohio!  I have family who still live in West Virginia near the WV/OH border and our family reunion on my dad's side is always in a little place called Tiltonsville, OH.

    Callie, my cat, is very strange!  :)  She was my dad's cat and I brought her home with me when he passed away.  My mom was going to put her in a shelter because no one could do anything with her.  She wasn't very social.  I ended up catching her and bringing her home.  Almost 4 years, later, she is like a different cat and she is very social now, if a bit strange and weird at times.  :)  She loves the dogs and I think she wants to be one.  However, she still has that cat mentality that cats rule because she is constantly putting them in their place and letting them know she is the boss.  Kind of strange to watch consider they outweigh her boy about 40 pounds each.  :)

  • ChoholeChohole Posts: 33,604
    edited October 2016

    Glad you safe!  Your cat is too funny!  We have an area in Ohio that is more prone to tornados than the rest of Ohio.  Zanesville was almost wiped out some years back.  Its very strange, you drive through town and there is a very clear deliniation between the older historical buildings that survived and the new ones that went up to replace the ones that the tornado wiped out.  Lots of death's there as well.  So sad.  I'm fortunate that the area of Ohio that I live in is not as prone as others.    Its very strange but the storms seem to split around us a lot of the time. 

    I didn't realize you were in Ohio!  I have family who still live in West Virginia near the WV/OH border and our family reunion on my dad's side is always in a little place called Tiltonsville, OH.

    Callie, my cat, is very strange!  :)  She was my dad's cat and I brought her home with me when he passed away.  My mom was going to put her in a shelter because no one could do anything with her.  She wasn't very social.  I ended up catching her and bringing her home.  Almost 4 years, later, she is like a different cat and she is very social now, if a bit strange and weird at times.  :)  She loves the dogs and I think she wants to be one.  However, she still has that cat mentality that cats rule because she is constantly putting them in their place and letting them know she is the boss.  Kind of strange to watch consider they outweigh her boy about 40 pounds each.  :)

    Cat and Dog relationships can be very amusing.  I had an oldish Collie who "adopted" all the young creatures in the Chohole patch, chcikens, rabbits, ferrets, she nannied them all. My son presented me with a very young kitten to bring up, he had rescued 2 and he had kept the  sibling.  Rhona adopted him with glee, and brought him up as a "pussy dog" who went walkies and everything. When we got another dog, this time a terrier puppy. Tiggy was a full grown cat and he in his turn adopted the puppy; but as a playmate. He showed him how to stalk frogs and catch mice, but never could teach him how to climb trees.  The people in the Old people's home which overlooked where we took the dogs walking thought it was highly amusing at walk time.  Collie, then a terrier half her size, then a cat, all walking along in file.  One the way back Tiggy (the cat) would often have given up walking and be riding on Himself's shoulder like a parrot.

    Post edited by Chohole on
  • Chohole said:

    Glad you safe!  Your cat is too funny!  We have an area in Ohio that is more prone to tornados than the rest of Ohio.  Zanesville was almost wiped out some years back.  Its very strange, you drive through town and there is a very clear deliniation between the older historical buildings that survived and the new ones that went up to replace the ones that the tornado wiped out.  Lots of death's there as well.  So sad.  I'm fortunate that the area of Ohio that I live in is not as prone as others.    Its very strange but the storms seem to split around us a lot of the time. 

    I didn't realize you were in Ohio!  I have family who still live in West Virginia near the WV/OH border and our family reunion on my dad's side is always in a little place called Tiltonsville, OH.

    Callie, my cat, is very strange!  :)  She was my dad's cat and I brought her home with me when he passed away.  My mom was going to put her in a shelter because no one could do anything with her.  She wasn't very social.  I ended up catching her and bringing her home.  Almost 4 years, later, she is like a different cat and she is very social now, if a bit strange and weird at times.  :)  She loves the dogs and I think she wants to be one.  However, she still has that cat mentality that cats rule because she is constantly putting them in their place and letting them know she is the boss.  Kind of strange to watch consider they outweigh her boy about 40 pounds each.  :)

    Cat and Dog relationships can be very amusing.  I had an oldish Collie who "adopted" all the young creatures in the Chohole patch, chcikens, rabbits, ferrets, she nannied them all. My son presented me with a very young kitten to bring up, he had rescued 2 and he had kept the  sibling.  Rhona adopted him with glee, and brought him up as a "pussy dog" who went walkies and everything. When we got another dog, this time a terrier puppy. Tiggy was a full grown cat and he in his turn adopted the puppy; but as a playmate. He showed him how to stalk frogs and catch mice, but never could teach him how to climb trees.  The people in the Old people's home which overlooked where we took the dogs walking thought it was highly amusing at walk time.  Collie, then a terrier half her size, then a cat, all walking along in file.  One the way back Tiggy (the cat) would often have given up walking and be riding on Himself's shoulder like a parrot.

    Oh, that's adorably cute!  I can just see them all in a line like that!  :)  I had a Keeshond for about 14 years and, at one point, one of the cats had a single kitten in a litter.  My Kees kind of adopted that kitten and the kitten though of the dog as sibling.   They slept together and did most things together.  When he went out in the yard for any length of time he, the dog was put on a long lead hooked to the decking.  That cat would go out hunting and always bring back her kills for the dog's approval which he never ate, but he would give her kisses when she did this.  Kind of gross, but sweet.  :)

  • 3Diva3Diva Posts: 11,620

    Hey, Knittingmommy. I'm just dropping by to see how you're doing. I Hope you are doing well! :D I don't know what the weather is like right now where you are but I hope it's treating you ok. Let us know how you're doing. :)

  • I'm doing fine.  It's been very sunny here since the hurricane left to wreck havoc on those north of us.  We took the storm shutters down today as it doesn't look like the hurricane is going to loop back around as originally predicted.  Since the weather turned nice, I got up the courage to an Iray render.  Those take awhile on my computer, sometimes, and I don't like starting them with threats of power outages.  A little bit of post and he'll be in my gallery sometime this evening.  

  • IceDragonArtIceDragonArt Posts: 12,548

    Our cat and dog can be hysterical.  We have one of those mesh screen doors with magnets that run the whole length down the middle so the animals can come and go into the back yard (privacy fenced) whenever its nice out and we are home and we don't have to get up and down all the time.  The new one we have has magnets the whole length and works much better at keeping the bugs out but Dragon (the cat) hates it, I think he is a little afraid of it and its a bit harder for him to push through.  So he will wait for Ella (the dog) to come into the kitchen then he meows at her and she will go out the door and he will follow close enough that he can slip through before it closes back up.  Then Ella turns around and comes back in.  He has her nicely trained lol. He weight about 8lbs and she weighs about 55lbs

  • Pets are amazing, aren't they?  That is too cute for words!  :)

  • IceDragonArtIceDragonArt Posts: 12,548

    I had to look up Tiltonsville lol.  That's about 2 1/2 hours from where I live.  Not really that far, we have done day rode trips up to 3 hours away lol.

  • KnittingmommyKnittingmommy Posts: 8,191
    edited October 2016

    I just thought I'd post about why I haven't been around lately.   As some of you know, I had DS up and running in Linux awhile back.  Then, I tried to get Tomb Raider working and totally trashed my graphics to the point I couldn't get into Linux.  I gave it a break for awhile figuring I'd get to it at some point and get it working again.  Well, my very flaky install of Windows 10 finally decided to take a dive so that I was totally without my desktop.  All I had was my laptop which I hadn't updated since DS 4.7.  I know that because that's the version I have on my laptop with a beta 4.8 install.  

    So, long story short, I was more determined than ever to get Linux back up and running.  I've spent the last few days getting that all working.  I finally was able to plug in my Windows drive in a portable drive bay so I could try to see my files on there.  Believe it or not, I spent a long time just figuring out why I couldn't get Linux to see the drive.  I thought I was in pretty bad shape.  I'm switching usb ports like crazy ( I have a lot of them on this motherboard) trying figure out if Linux wasn't seeing the usb ports or not.  Linux can see them, but nothing plugged in.  Then I noticed that I hadn't turned the power button on the portable drive.  Yes, boys and girls, that first thing they always ask, "Is the power button on?" is the one thing I forgot and didn't actually see on the box!  Go ahead.  Laugh.  :)

    So, Linux Mint 18 is up and running and DIM and DS are up and running.  I can now see all of my files and I'm transferring them from the old drive to the new Linux drive where DS can see all of My DAZ Library.  And, there are a LOT of them.  By the time you figure in materials, textures and shaders, buildings and props, figures and hair, I had a whopping 2,360,437 files that I have to transfer taking approximately 17 to 20 hours, depending on how things flow with the transfer utility, if I don't want to have to install everything all over again.  Needless to say, I won't be rendering anything any time real soon.  It might take me a couple of days to get back up to speed.  Luckily, most of my downloads were on a separate portable drive so if the Windows drive wasn't readable at least I wouldn't have had to download EVERYTHING!  :)

    I thought I'd share some screenshots

    Yay! DS is working in Linux!  :)

    Yay! Too many files which prove I'm a DAZaholic!  :(

    Luckily, I was able to go to the galleries and download one of my favorite images for a wallpaper again until I had all my files on the new drive.  Aren't those bots cute?  In case you are wondering, the artist is Isidorn and not me.

    I hope to be back to rendering soon and I'll upload my first render on the new system when I test it out more fully.  As you can see, if you look hard enough, I did get some of the important things up and running: Tomb Raider, Civ V, Civ V Beyond via Steam and Netflix!  :)  And, of course, Blender, but that's native Linux so that one was super easy.  I have to figure out where to find the icons for DIM and DAZ Studio so I can fix those, but that's a minor inconvenience at the moment.  I, also, have Scrivener for Linux up and running and GIMP.  I just found out that you can 'install' Steam for Windows and it works reasonably well so I might have access to all of my Steam Windows games, too, once I'm done getting my DS files all transferred.  I don't know if I'll reinstall Windows at this point, but, if I do, it won't be Win 10.  I have my Win 7 disk waiting in the wings and I'll install that if I find I need to do that.

    I'm very glad I didn't seem to lose any files because I had started working on a couple of tutorials and it looks like I still have the scene files for those.  I don't think I had gotten to the point of taking any of the screenshots, though, so those will be all new.  :)  Oh, and, I have the screenshot program working, too, obviously.

    So, you guys all get to rendering so I can live vicariously for the moment.  I'll be back to it soon!  :)

     

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  • algovincianalgovincian Posts: 2,621

    Welcome back!

    - Greg

  • @algovincian  Thanks, Greg!  :)

  • Good to hear!!  Glad you got things sorted out- and I'd be that person too..."Power, what? ....Ohcrap."

  • @DarwinsMishap  Hi!  I think this might be the first time you've braved my little corner of the world!  :)  Welcome!  Yeah, I know, right?  That's like the first thing the IT guys always ask and I totally didn't even see it.!  :)

  • lol- oh, I've been lurking for a while now.  See that corner? With the chains? Mine. ;)

     

  • Oso3DOso3D Posts: 15,021

    Eeep! That's a whole bunch of annoying nonsense.

    Had my own nonsense lately. Glad things are squared away!

  • lol- oh, I've been lurking for a while now.  See that corner? With the chains? Mine. ;)

     

    LOL!!! That's funny.  Knittingmommy's Lab complete with chains!  :)  I'll have to remember that.

    I've heard I have lurkers and they pop up, occasionally, but it still feels kind of strange that people are interested in my muddling around with all of this stuff.  :)  Most of the time I have no idea what I'm doing.  I just stumble through and hope I learn something.  I have heard that I have even taught others a thing or two.  Makes it all worth it.  :)

  • Eeep! That's a whole bunch of annoying nonsense.

    Had my own nonsense lately. Glad things are squared away!

    Yeah, me, too.  Now is the boring part where I get to sit and watch the files all get transferred.  :)

  • And, don't I feel just SO happy!  cheeky  angry  (They need an irony smiley)  The more my files go across from one drive to the other the longer my time frame keeps climbing.  The transfer says Time to Completion is now approximately 50 hours!  surprise  I liked it better when it said 17.

  • IceDragonArtIceDragonArt Posts: 12,548

    When I lost all my content and had to start over, just loading all of my daz files through DIM took 3 days.  That was about  9 months ago. Add the photo shop files and all the rpg games and all of my bead files I can't even imagine.  Good luck!

  • Welcome back!  We missed you!

  • When I lost all my content and had to start over, just loading all of my daz files through DIM took 3 days.  That was about  9 months ago. Add the photo shop files and all the rpg games and all of my bead files I can't even imagine.  Good luck!

    Luckily, I had a lot of stuff on a 3 TB portable drive that I used to store a lot of files or things would have been much worse.  All of my saved zipfiles for all of my DAZ files, from DAZ and other sources are all on the storage drive so I don't even have to worry about transferring those off of the Windows drive that I might end up reformatting.  The trashed from only had about 1 and half TB of stuff on it and that was mostly My DAZ Library stuff and Steam games.

     

    Welcome back!  We missed you!

    Ah, thanks!  I missed being around as much.  Trying to navigate the forums on my phone when I first lost my desktop was brutal.  My laptop is probably on it's last legs, but at least I was able to mostly keep up.  I've really missed playing around with DAZ stuff, though.  I can't wait to get back in there and have a render going again.  

  • Oso3DOso3D Posts: 15,021

    Yeah, my annoyance was my hard drive was failing (which I didn't realize until I had done a rollback of previous update, and then reinstalled OS, then...)

    Thankfully I had a spare harddrive on hand and everything backed up via Dropbox, but then it took soooo long to get Dropbox updated, and make sure it was hooked into DS. About 4-5 days of no art. ugh

     

  • LinwellyLinwelly Posts: 5,956

    Good to have you back here Knitting, that kind of stuff can be a real pain... around everywhere.

    I'm planning to set up my old labtop as a linux system with Daz running on it, but I first have to get all the old stuff moved... which is so boring and time consuming that I keep procrastinating .. but I wanna have my little farm.. render farm that is

  • IceDragonArtIceDragonArt Posts: 12,548

    "Luckily, I had a lot of stuff on a 3 TB portable drive that I used to store a lot of files or things would have been much worse.  All of my saved zipfiles for all of my DAZ files, from DAZ and other sources are all on the storage drive so I don't even have to worry about transferring those off of the Windows drive that I might end up reformatting.  The trashed from only had about 1 and half TB of stuff on it and that was mostly My DAZ Library stuff and Steam games."

    I'm going to have to look into this. I can't even back up my system as I can't find anything that has enough memory on a flash drive or cd. And I don't know how else to do it lol. 

  • Oso3DOso3D Posts: 15,021

    If you have a reliable/good connection, there's Dropbox or other cloud storage solutions. I like it because if my home vanishes, it's still out there.

    Though most cloud storage only goes up to 1 TB (at a price of ~$10/month)

     

     

  • KnittingmommyKnittingmommy Posts: 8,191
    edited October 2016

    Hi All!

    I was bored watching files move from one place to another and decided to do some puttering around in GIMP since I can't render anything yet.  I took some throw away test images I have in my Render directory on my external storage drive and opened them up to test the GIMP that I have installed in Linux to make sure everything works.  I ended up with the following images which are actually kind of fun.  Both images were done with filters from the FX-Foundry collection of GIMP filters.

    A closeup of Star from a pirate themed picture of Star that I did while working on the Star image in my gallery.  She was rendered in Iray.

    Original:

    GIMP postwork with Pastel filter:

    And, here is a test image of a large underwater scene that I've been working on for awhile.  I started setting this scene up before I got any of the scatter tools so it took a long time to place all of the plants in the scene, most of which you can't see in this image.  I ended up taking a long break from it and haven't gotten back to it.  Now, that I have some tools to make it easier, I'll have to finish it up sometime.  I believe this was rendered in 3Delight, but I'm not sure about that.

    Original:

    GIMP postwork with Lanscape Illustrator:

    I think both turned out kind of nice with an NPR type of effect which I really like.  I'll have to play with the settings in these filters some more to see how they change the image.

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  • KnittingmommyKnittingmommy Posts: 8,191
    edited October 2016

    And, one more.  

    Original:

    GIMP 2.8 FX Foundry: Pencil Sketch:

     

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  • Oso3DOso3D Posts: 15,021

    One suggestion with outlining: I find a little bit of blur on the outline layer and lightening it a bit (either with reduced opacity or changing levels) can help make a more subtle, nicer looking layer.

     

  • One suggestion with outlining: I find a little bit of blur on the outline layer and lightening it a bit (either with reduced opacity or changing levels) can help make a more subtle, nicer looking layer.

     

    Thanks, I'll try that.  This one was just the basic see what it does, but didn't really play with the settings too much yet.  I liked that, when Pencil Sketch was finished processing, there were layers that I could play with.  Some of the filters just give you the final output.  I don't know if there is a way to stop that final merge step or not.  With the Pencil Sketch filter, I have an outline layer to play with so I can go back in and try your suggestions.  I like the filters that leave all of the layers instead on merging them all because then I can play with the different layers and get a look that I like with the output.  

    I think you and @algovinician have been a very big influence on me because I've been player with layers way more than I used to do.   I'm hoping all for the better, but that remains to be seen.  :)

    I'll go back in soon and play with the outline layer and see how your suggestions influence the final image.  It will be an interesting little challenge.  :)

  • KnittingmommyKnittingmommy Posts: 8,191
    edited October 2016

    Ah, I think I'm on the last batch of DS files that I need to transfer.  I might actually get to set something up to render later today and see how it does.

    So, I took Will's advice and played with blurring the Outline layer that I got from the Pencil Sketch filter.  Here is what I ended up with.  I'm amazed that the slight blurring and change in Opacity on the Outline layer can affect what the final image looks like so much.  Thanks for the tips, Will.  The differences might be subtle, but they do really make a big difference! I think I like the last one best, but I'll keep playing with everything.

    Outline Layer: Blur set at 2 and Opacity at about 67%:

    Outline Layer: Blur set at 4 and Opacity at about 81%:

    Outline Layer: Blur set at 4 and Opacity at about 67%:

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    Post edited by Knittingmommy on
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