Our New Office Space

As some of you might know I resigned in 2012 as CEO from BIT BV, the company that I founded together with my business partner in 1996. Don't worry we didn't sell it, but I didn't like the job of being CEO any more. I like working with my hand more and that wasn't possible anymore in the company. I'm still connected closely but in the background. So in 2012 I started a new company and since then I've been very busy setting up some new services and have been working on several products.

In the beginning of the year we did a little renovation at home, mainly putting in a new floor. Since both myself and my wife work from home now we decided to build a little office at home. In the picture above you see my work space on the left and hers on the right. Here is a close-up of my workspace. It is mainly focussed on doing both maintenance of the Virtiso and the Render Farm hardware/cloud platforms and also on doing 3D design and animation stuff for Van Osenbruggen Productions. I can also work on my videos for here now. I'm currently working on new websites for Virtiso and the RenderFarm so more on that soon and also on what I do there. I know I haven't posted here in the while, but I will try do pick that up again.

Here is some of the input devices I use. On top (almost our of site) is a track pad, left a track ball in the middle a 3D mouse, then on the right my Oculus Rift and below a drawing pad. They all have their use in my work flow even though the Oculus is mainly for fun :). So this is where I spend a lot of my time lately. I also build a very special work station. I will do another post on the soon.

So I can hear some of your thinking. Did he stop making music? No I didn't! To be honest I can't wait to get back to that very soon, but I just had to start up all this new business too. That took a lot of time. Unfortunately as many of you know, you can't make a living from music any more especially the kind of music I make with Synth.nl. I will pick that up for sure soon. I plan some changes in the studio first that I will tell you about as well. OK enough on the office now. I just wanted to share with you what has been happening here lately.

3D Print for the Kids

I didn't use the 3D printer for a while since it actually broke down. I had some material stuck in the extruder and couldn't get it out. When I removed the print head I could push it out, but accidentally damaged the NTC resistor that measures the heads temperature, so I had to replace that as well. Well that is all done now. Another problem I had was that the material didn't stick well to the print bed. After reading and experimenting a lot I finally decided to stick blue 3M scotch tape to the bed and now it prints like a charm :)

But what to print then to test if it is working OK again. I decided it was time to print something for my kids. I have two daughters in the age of 11 and 13 so what to print for them. Well I did print a nice T-Rex puzzle for myself a while ago and back then I found some more of those so I started to look with them for something they would like. And we did find this very nice one. Here is a picture of all the parts and then look what you can make from that :)

A very nice butterfly. Actually it isn't as easy as it looks to put it together. Since the printer has some tolerance some parts don't with and you will have to use a knife to make the connections a but smoother and then still you need some force to put the parts together. The good side about this is that once it fits it won't fall apart easily. By now I have quite some colors of PLA print material on stock so they could choose their own colors.

As you might have guessed my oldest daughter wanted one in pink and the youngest in yellow. A nice project that took my mind of work for some time. I have been way too busy lately to be honest. Printing and building a butterfly like this is a whole day's work by the way. Of course you can do other things while printing, but still you have to keep an eye on the printer as well as somethings things go wrong. Here is a last picture of both of them together.

Biz2Be 3D Logo Animation

I made another 3D Logo Animation. This this for Biz2Be. It was animated in Cinema 4D and it was rendered in High Quality on RenderFarm.NL. The customer uses the logo as intro and outro of his videos that you can find on http://www.biz2be.nl.

New Website for TTV BIT.NL

Some of you might know that I also play table tennis. And if you didn't now you know ;) I recently made a new website for the table tennis club. I used to of our players pictures in the header of the website. The most important new feature on the site is the new calendar and the news section up front. The website is hosted at the shared Joomla webhosting of Virtiso BV. I hope you like the new design. You can find the live website at: http://www.ttvbit.nl

Meet Tracy Ray at RenderFarm.NL

As you all know by now probably one of the new companies I'm setting up is a commercial Render Farm. This new company is called RenderFarm.NL and it has a new face. She is called Tracy Ray. Tracy is in charge of all our render cows that are at your immediate disposal. I'm still working hard on the new website but the render farm is already operational, so do contact me (or Tracy) if you have a deadline and need some frames rendered. We support a lot of software already and are always open for new things. Even custom setups are possible. If you know people that are in the media / content creation or 3D animation business then please point them to us. Our contact details are on the website at http://www.renderfarm.nl

Let us know when you have a render job. You can e-mail me at tracy@renderfarm.nl for a quote.