Ghost in the Church

For Christmas, I received a new graphics card.  NVIDIA GeForce GTX508,  with 3Gb RAM and 512 CUDA cores!  Blender can offload the rendering to the GPU.  A test render that took over 9 minutes using my Intel Core 2 Quad CPU, takes only 51 seconds on the new GPU.  This makes an amazing difference with real-time feedback when tweaking textures.

Here is a test scene that I was not able to make look good using CPU only rendering,  I couldn't get the ghost texture right using trial and error and having to wait for feedback.

And another super-fast render.  This time of a midge, I previously gave up tweaking the textures on this one as it took several minutes to see the effect of any changes.  Not now :)

CyberNat

Scottish Politics is an interesting place these days with an ongoing battle for the minds of the population between the mainstream media and bloggers.   The phrase CyberNats (Cyber Nationalists) was coined to refer to online bloggers who challenge the storyline being pumped through the established news channels. 

Without going too political on here, I liked the imagery of a CyberNat, here is my interpretation based on the dreaded highland midge.

CyberNat

CyberNat fuel