March News and WIP 2025

Hey hey! Finished up the Tifa Pinball alt animation 2 days ago and will be continuing work on the Yuffie Train animation after I finish setting up the computer I just built. I built a new computer (minus the RTX 5090 T_T and 1 or 2 future NVME drives). It took me 5 hours to build, with help from some viewers/fans in my discord XD. I would say half of the patreon income from last year went into building this computer specifically for Blender, gaming is only secondary, so thank you for your patronage. The first 2 images is the new computer, the last image is the old computer. This is the list and pricing so you know where your patreon money went.
-AMD 9950x
-MSI X870E Tomahawk Wifi
-G.Skill 32GB DDR5 [selling these to buy 64GB instead]
(all three above combined in a bundle for 750 USD)
-NZXT Kraken 360mm AIO (180 USD)
-Corsair 5000D Airflow Case (170USD)
-Corsair RM1200X 1200w Power Supply (205 USD)
-Samsung 990 Pro 1TB (99 USD)
-Samsung 990 Pro 2TB (168 USD)
-Corsair Vengeance 64GB DDR5 RAM (200 USD)
-Windows 11 (25USD)

So a total of about 1800 USD before tax. At the moment, I am mostly transferring files TB's of models/scenes and other stuff, loading up 17,000 fire fox tabs, reinstalling software/addons and remembering what settings I need to set (a lot of sound notifications to turn off on steam, discord, etc). From preliminary testing, baking bodily fluids is 30% faster (example, instead of taking 3 hours, it takes 2 hours to bake them white fluids). A lot of times, I spend 1-3 days baking 20 or 30 times to get acceptable results by changing values. Rendering times didn't change much per frame, but it does start a render faster. Basically once a frame is rendered, it takes time for the CPU to set up for the next frame to render. Not sure how much faster it is now for setting up for the next frame, but it is faster. I would've preferred a GPU upgrade since it can cut down rendering times by HALF, so 150 hours would be cut down to 80 hours.

I will semi-retire my previous computer of 7 years (intel i9 9900k, 32GB RAM) for now. Maybe I will use her as a 2nd computer to render or game in the future if I can get new/replacement parts for her lol. Hope to get everything settle down in 1-2 days and work on Yuffie train. Main reason why I did this upgrade right at this time is because of US tariffs and because that Yuffie train animation.. I see it using A LOT OF RAM. Yuffie, Tifa, Aerith, 2-3 male shinra guards, and 6-8 train passenger NPCs. Anyways, thank you, you Sexy Beasts. And hur hur hur.. Tifa Gif on the AIO screen.