Very Powerfull 3D Work Station

I promised to write something about the new 3D work station that I put in my new office. Even though I can use the render farm for animations it is nice to have a very powerful PC to work on the 3D projects. Primarily you need a very powerful video card to use the GPU for screen calculations. I installed a Asus Nvidea GTX 690 for this. But also CPU power is helpful since you do need to render out a single frame on high quality to see how it is going to look later on when you render the animation on the render farm. And you don't want to wait for ever. So in this machine is a special work station mother board from Asus called the Z9 PE-D8WS and on there are two Intel Xeon processors of the type 2796 V2. Actually the fastest processors out there. They actually have 12 CPU cores each so that makes 24 CPU cores in one machine!

I also installed 64 Gbytes of RAM and it boots its OS and loads its applications from a super fast OCZ Revo Drive 3. This is kind of a SSD drive on a dedicated PCIe card. The there is a OCZ Vertex 4 for the data I'm working on for the project and a Raid 1 set of two Sata disks for storage of larger files. The Asus mother board is very big, so I needed to buy a very large case to fit it all. And then to keep things a bit quiet I installed a lot of large cooling fans with a special fan control unit that you can see in the picture below. This really is a monster PC that makes working on the most complicated projects a breeze. For your idea this PC scores 2960 CB points in Cinebench where my normal Render Node Servers in the render farm score about 1000 CB.

The fan controller is also very nice. It has a touch screen where you can regulate the desired temperature for each fan. There are sensors attached to this controller on certain spots in the machine, like CPU's, GPU's, drives etc and it regulates the fan speeds to keep this temperatures. This results in a very quiet PC when it is idle and just a little bit of noise when it is at 100% CPU. I also have some software where I don't have licenses for the render farm yet, so for those applications I also use this machine to render frames for customers on RenderFarm.NL. I recently did a series of Vue renders on this machine for a customer. It is not a cheap machines as you can imagine but it does have the power of three normal PC's. I already had a lot of pleasure from it. I hope this post can help anyone else that need to spec a very nice 3D work station. But for animations do contact me for the use of the render farm so you can work on other projects on your work station during the rendering of your animation.

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.

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

New Website for Biz2Be

I showed you the Biz2Be 3D logo and 3D under construction page before, but now the website is finished. The customer selected the 3 pictures and I made the header graphic in Cinema 4D. I think the graphs complement the logo and general theme of the company. I made the rest of the website in Joomla 2.5 for the customer so that he can update the content himself. The website is hosted on a shared Joomla webserver at Virtiso. You can visit the website if you like at http://www.biz2be.nl. The customer did call me last week that he had a spontaneous potential customer already. Always nice to hear :)

Biz2Be 3D Logo and Under Construction Page

For a friend who is starting a new company I'm currently doing some 3D work. First of all another design company made a new logo for him in 2D. I got the vector file from him and we made some adjustments to the bottom text and then I made this 3D logo for him. I think it turned out quite nice. Then he asked me to make an 'under construction' page for him to put the logo online while he is working on his website. I though let's make something nice. I rigged the little character to take this position and added some nice contruction elements to make a complete 3D scene out of it. You can view the full version by clicking on the picture or visiting his website http://www.biz2be.nl (as long as it is not done yet). I hope you like it. And do contact me if you have a job like this :)

Van Osenbruggen Productions Blog

Since I want to differentiate more between my different activities and the fact that I'll start even more in the future (more information will follow), I just started a new Blog for my 3D and Design activities that I do under the name 'Van Osenbruggen Productions'. So if you are interested in these activities do follow me on those other pages. I just started a new Facebook page as well and opened a new Twitter account that I will use for this in the future. You can find everything here:

• Website -> http://www.osenbruggen.nl
• Blog -> http://vanosenbruggen.blogspot.com
• Facebook -> http://www.facebook.com/Osenbruggen
• Twitter -> http://www.twitter.com/vOsenbruggen

 I had to be creative here and there with login names and URLs since some were already taken. I hope you will follow my 3D work in the future as well. Thanks! I will keep on posting the Synth.nl videos of course on here as well.

Adobe Edge and HTML5 Video Project

I did another project with Adobe Edge. This time I made an animation that shows my video projects on the first page of http://www.osenbruggen.nl. When you click an icon a HTML5 YouTube player pops up. You can click next to it to close the video. I hope that is clear enough by the way. I hope you like it. I plan to do the same thing on the rest of the website, but it is a lot of work so that can take some time :) I also changed the menu of the website to make more room for this animation. I guess the website will be a work in progress for a while. I tested the animation on Firefox, Explorer, Safari and Chrome and also on an Ipad and an Android tablet. It seems to work even though on an Ipad the auto start of the video doesn't work. Well please let me know if you encounter any problems. Go to the website to see it: http://www.osenbruggen.nl

New Osenbruggen Productions Webdesign

The last few days I did a lot of work updating my Osenbruggen Productions website. I redid the header with a background image that I made in Vue 10. So it is not a photograph, but a computer rendered image. The rest was done in Cinema 4D. I also did a lot of work on the menus so now it is easier to click through all the images and animations on the website. I'm still looking for some nice jobs for 3D animations work by the way ;) I hope you like the new design. You can find the website on http://www.osenbruggen.nl

New Website with 3D Animation work

I know some of you like my 3D work as well as my music. I plan to do lots more work in this direction with or without my music. But because it doesn't really fit on the Synth.nl website I just put up a new website on http://www.osenbruggen.nl/. I'm planning to do some jobs for customers as well together with my wife. We already build a few websites, videos, logos and animations for customers and we are hoping to get a few more jobs in the future of course. We are using the name 'Van Osenbruggen Productions' for this from now on. Maybe you have seen the name popping up in one of my videos already by the way. Well anyway on the website you can find the videos, websites, logos and animations we did so far. More will come for sure :)