Zoe 2.0 2.0 and Hardware Woes

While rendering is ongoing, Disregard took a shot at modernizing my old Zoe model himself and I think the results are fairly good!

After Cid’s initial Zoe redesign was turned into Chloe, there was still the problem with Zoe’s model hanging in the air, so seeing Alex making some progress on that is pretty nice, even if she won’t be returning until Encounter 4. Alex took the Patreon feedback into consideration for a much more subtle rework of her model, mainly fixing the terrible topology as well as some of my personal peeves, such as that big alien head of the previous model version. The new head took a few design cues from Chloe’s head structure as well, making it a lot more sleek than how it used to be. Keep in mind that I’ll be adding fur at a later point, which will make her head appear a lot broader again due to the longer cheek tufts, in case anyone thinks she looks a little too sleek at this point.

Unfortunately, my render PC seems to be on its last breaths as I’m typing this. For those that remember, it’s a system with an i9-13900K CPU that has been affected by the Intel Voltage issue and has degraded to the point of complete system instability. As of right now, the system is freezing or BSOD’ing once every hour, all despite having all the BIOS updates and a heavily under clocked CPU, as most applications won’t even start on standard clocks anymore. The Thunderbolt port on the motherboard also has a weirdly loose connection, which causes the second external GPU to disconnect every now and then, further adding to the factors of issues with this system. Welp, I might have saved a few thousand dollars initially with this configuration, but it’s all coming back to bite me in the butt now.

Luckily I was able to save up enough for a Threadripper-based workstation by now, which should be arriving in a week or two! I’ll get into detail on the specs once it arrives, but in theory it should be able to fit both the RTX 4090 cards internally and power them as well. Hopefully. Probably. Most likely. Lastly, one of my screens decided to follow the trend and randomly gave up a few days ago, about 6 months past its warranty of course. Nothing crucial luckily, but still something that adds on top to the hill of broken stuff. I can luckily have it repaired for a price that is only a fraction of buying a new one, but still… this is the second screen in a year. Luckily the first one was still in its warranty period, oh well! I should still be fine as long as nothing else breaks in the upcoming weeks!

Note that the April preview at the end of this month might be slightly delayed due to all of these issues. I’m still having to wait 1 - 2 weeks on the render workstation replacement, so I’m hoping I can still kick the current system to spit out a few more frames until the replacement arrives. I’ll have another post up in 2 weeks either way!