Reply To: Polybook – Jake

[Jake Korosi]

The last year and a half has been just disastrous.

First, my monitor went bad.  So I replaced it.  Then my computer’s power supply unit started failing, so I replaced that.  A couple months ago, I damaged my drawing tablet, so I’ve just managed to replace that (it arrived Wednesday!).  Now Tuesday night, my video card died.  Well, almost died – it only works using the generic Windows display driver, and the screen is filled with vertical glitchy-color bars.  

On top of that, when trying to figure out what the problem was, I ended up reinstalling Windows – several times, because the installs kept getting interrupted midway by the failing video card whenever the graphics drivers were installed.  By the end of it, NONE of my user files were successfully saved.  It’s not a huge deal since most of my files by far are saved to OneDrive; but a couple of months ago I ran out of OneDrive space, and hadn’t gotten around to getting a 360 sub to give me some more space – meaning my last couple of Blender projects weren’t clouded and are now gone forever.  Those are the spaceship I just made for the July contest, and the Egyptian character I was making for the realistic character course.

The July contest is done, and although I had some future plans for that model, they involved redoing a good portion of it anyway, so I guess that’s not a crushing loss.  But that character was only halfway done.  I was waiting for my new tablet to arrive so I could finish it, and now I have to start from scratch.  It’s hard to explain how demoralizing this whole situation is.

A friend of mine is sending me an old video card, that they think still works.  Hopefully it does – but, it’s old, and will not run Blender 2.8.  It will be….a while, before I save up enough to get a new video card that’s an actual upgrade over the one I had that just died.  So I’m going to be stuck for a while using 2.79, I guess.  I will not be able to do any decently complex projects either, since I think the card I’m being lent has like 512MB of VRAM.  Looking over my options here, it looks like my best bet is going to be diving into the Animation Bootcamp, which I’ve been wanting to do but kept putting off in favor of modeling courses and projects.  The pre-2.80 VonnBots are still available, and I’m quite grateful for that!  But until I get a new card it looks like that’s where I’ll be stuck.