The desk is purely utilitarian. I have shelves for my PS3 and Xbox 360 designed, in addition to an open area for my computer case to sit in.

There is a "center" section which goes in the corner and one "wing" section on either side. The left "wing" is for the electronics, while the right is going to have a tray type thing under the surface where i can stash a power strip so i have additional places to plug in any computers I happen to be fixing.

Im trying to make it so that I can build it in pieces over the course of a few trips out to my grandmother's house where the tools are. I also have "designed" a cheap means of mounting my two monitors. Swivel mounts would add extra cost that I don't want to deal with. With T-Nuts being 7-8 cents a piece combined with the fact that I will have to adjust heights because my monitors are both different, a simple solution cut out of plywood scraps should be strong enough to hold them.

Anyways, since you guys likely have far more practical experience than I do, I'll upload my current file for suggestions. With a couple minor notes xD

I'm also thinking about tossing a plastic grommet in the middle of the desk surface to handle the wires from my keyboard/mouse. Not sure if I want to "ruin" the clean top though. I also need to go through and name components, organize, and combine anything that is otherwise doubled. I will do this once I get the design sorted out.

On the "to-do" list is sorting out a proper height for the thing. I will do that once I know how much height whatever method I use for feet is sorted out.

CornerDesk.skp

@mitcorb said:

You should be able to find a threaded insert type adjustable foot at a hardware store. If not, check at an appliance store, since washing machines and drying machines use these features.
Some of these may require that you use an adjustable jaw wrench, you know the type with the worm gear.
If the leg of the desk is significantly slender, you may want to consider a metal boot for each leg to keep the wood from splitting under stress of moving. There may actually be an adjustable foot that includes this boot.

I like to over-build things, the smallest leg is 2x2 so that shouldnt be an issue.

The thing is, if I do go this route I will need several of them. Buying them one at a time from stores gets expensive. For example, T-Nuts (which I love to use) are nearly 80 cents a piece at the local hardware store, yet I can buy 100 of them for 9 dollars on ebay lol.

Do you have any alternative suggestions perhaps? I am familiar with all the tools required to build basically anything I want, I just lack practical experience in design.

I'm putting together a rather ambitious design for a corner desk I hope to build in the future, seeing as I will have the room for it in a few weeks. The design is in 3 sections so far, and it spans 6 feet of wall in both directions in a corner.

Having lived in some houses in the past with rather poorly leveled floors i want to put in "feet" which can be adjusted up or down to level the entire desk as accurately as possible.

Any suggestions?

Obviously a notched peg/pin type of system isnt very accurate. Something with a threaded foot is what I am looking for, like these http://www.jwwinco.com/products/section7/

But designed for woodworking projects. Something I can just drill a hole and put in the whole unit at the bottom of the legs of the desk. I would like to be able to adjust it up to two inches if possible, just in case. The problem is I can't remember the name of these things to search for them

@ledisnomad said:

I'm no expert, but I try to keep up on exactly what you're looking for: bang-for-the-buck hardware. My office just bought a new laptop for presentations, but it needed to be robust enough to support real-time fly-through and design charrettes. We got an Alienware laptop from Dell. Although the Alienware is great, the 15" uncustomized model is $1200, perhaps a little more than your budget. However, the uncustomized Dell XPS 17" with similar power, maybe even a little more, is listed as $949. The only thing I'd upgrade on that is from Windows 7 Home to Pro for $130, so $1079, just over your budget.
You can find equally powerful laptops from many other companies that cost less than alienware does too. Other than the M11x (which is essentially a gaming netbook) their lowest base price listed at the moment is $1,200 USD before taxes and shipping.

If you are looking to get bang-for-your-buck hardware, then alienware is usually at the bottom of the list. The problem with alienware is that they have so much brand-hype and marketing behind their systems that they charge far more than what would otherwise be available elsewhere.

$750-$1000
http://www.newegg.com/Product/ProductList.aspx?Submit=ENE&N=100006740%204022&IsNodeId=1&ShowDeactivatedMark=False

Just for some "budget" examples.

CAPTCHA page

(www.newegg.com)

1200 dollars for that, and that laptop outperforms my desktop. My desktop is no slouch, and cost more than that just for the tower.
The problem with that m17x alienware unit is that you are paying extra for the nvidia 3dvision. Do you really need that?

I would just like to point out that as someone who enjoys this kind of thing as a very occasional hobby, this is great.

Bookmarked for sure. Every time I have an idea for a project I'll be checking that out for ideas/tips.

This could turn out to be a very VERY useful tool for people. Far more accurate than "My 3D Scanner" and doesnt require textures.

The very best part is that given the right application it can do this in real-time. Microsoft has even released official drivers for the device as well.

If there is anyone viewing this with some coding skills, you might find this to be very interesting.

since i like this kind of stuff...

Q6600 quad core @ 3.2 GHZ.
EVGA GTX465SC core unlocked to 448 cores and overclocked 10%

No shadows:

Shadows:

Is this rendering plugin no longer a viable option with SU8?

Or have I simply "installed" it incorrectly?

Crosses finger Come on OpenCL!

Click link

BAWWWWWW Still happy to see a new release. Glad I came back to lurk some more again.

My coding experience is limited to web based stuff, and visual basic.

But wouldnt it be fantastic if CUDA could present its self to an application in such a way to appear to be many processors?

Like, a very general set of instructions that any developer could simply make calls to and voila! If only everything were that simple though right? If that were the case, I would have a better grade in my network security course at the moment.

@gaieus said:

Masta, above you said you are playing with Thea Render. I thought you already have a license (therefore I said that once GPU rendering is introduced, it will be "free" for you as a licensed user - certainly only if it makes it into the first version).

I have an nVidia GeForce 9600 GT (with 1Gb memory) which seems to be CUDA enabled according to this chart (note that I am a total idiot at hardware).

Oh you will have to excuse me, i was referring to KERKYthea. Did not know anything about this "thea" rendering software. So no, I have no such license.

The stuff I do is purely for my own entertainment when I get some random idea. I mostly use SU for mocking up speaker enclosures for people, or various bits of furniture I feel like building.

As for the 9600, having 1 gb of vram will not help you nearly as much as the performance of the card.

When it comes to CUDA, the performance of the chipset matters far more than the amount of memory. Of course, any form of GPU based rendering will be way faster than cpu rendering, regardless of which card you have. Especially if you can combine the two.

What card do you have currently?

And what is this about a thea license -> gpu support being free? I thought I saw somewhere that they will be introducing a paid version.

What paid rendering software supports it, just out of curiosity?

Didnt read the entire thread but if you have some minor electronics experience you can purchase individual cells and rebuild your battery pack. Most often this is FAR cheaper than purchasing a new pack or drill.

If you have moderate to good experience in it, you can find cells with a much higher capacity than the originals and extend the battery life by a large amount.

This is something I have done with laptop batteries in the past. What was a 150 dollar battery pack cost a friend of mine 45 dollars and about an hour of my time.

@pichuneke said:

Well, I have an ATI with OpenCL drivers... better OpenCL (for all) than the restricted Nvidia's CUDA

Well, yeah I can understand that.

Either way, that is a ton of processing power going to waste.

Hi guys, it has been a WHILE since I posted here last, and wound up finding my way back thanks to the fur plugin.

Sitting here toying around with it and I am rendering some grass tests. Now my CPU does a fairly decent job as it is a quad core, and I do have the ability to run 11 threads at once thanks to thea's "render farm" abilities and having multiple PCs in one house.

But that is kind of a pain to set up, so much so that I usually don't bother.

But I recently (last wednesday actually) purchased an nvidia GTX 465 graphics card. This thing is insane, I can throw down 2 MILLION faces worth of grass in this fur plugin and still work fluidly with the model.

But what I am really interested in is a rendering program that is capable of putting the 352 total cores inside the card to use.

4 threads is great, but (as the design garage tech demo will show you) the card is capable of ray tracing 2 frames per second at 1600x900 resolution. This is dozens of times faster than my quad core is capable of, and is something that we will likely see much more of in the future.

For those of you who are not aware of the 400 series cards and the tech demo i am referring to, see:

A quick look at that video will show you just how incredibly fast the scenes are raytraced. A perfect image can be obtained in just a few minutes with a GTX 480, while my 465 takes 2-3 times as long, as it is essentially a crippled 480.

Running multiple GPUs of this series can result in that demo rendering in < 2 minutes for a flawless image. So You can see why I am so excited about this technology just as someone who does this for fun, let alone professionally.

LOG STORY SHORT:

Are there any free rendering programs that utilize CUDA or GPU rendering?

@stewy said:

Hi Guys,

I now need to draw a neat hedge for a plan and want it to look good, doesn't need to have every leaf! and ideas on a good way to model it?
Thinking about it, being able to model trees would also be good

Thanks,

Stew
You could make a simple box in the shape of said hedge then apply a realistic, leafy repeating texture to it. You can of course add smaller details, like rounded/beveled edges and such. If you have photoshop skills they are easy to create, otherwise a search online should help. That I think is the simplest way of doing it. If i recall someone around here makes really REALLY nice foliage in SU...

Although I suspect you have already though of that idea and want something better. I seriously lack the skills to compromise between accuracy and easy modeling and have it look good. Its a fine line between a boxed hedge and one with branches and leaves.

Well, redoing all of the drivers didnt fix it...and it does it with ALL textures, just not the solid colors. So im at a bit of a loss. But I know its something to do with the video card on the software side because im having problems with hard reboots. My computer will just up and die when i load some games, but only rarely. Im not sure whats causing it yet, and every time it happens ai try to make a note of everything thats running... but its never really the same thing twice.

Oh well... such is life. Ill be buying a new computer eventually. Im waiting on the core 2 quads to drop in price again and ill be picking one up and over clocking it to about 3ghz. 220 bucks is still a bit more than id like to spend at the moment.

@gata said:

Drivers also need to play well with the OS. An OS update may be the cause.

If an updated GPU driver dosen't work, try older drivers.
There have been no new updates to anything since this worked last time, so idk whats causing it.
Im off to restart the PC and check the new drivers.

@tomsdesk said:

Have you checked the scale of your textures...looks like something I get sometimes (with some textures) when I'm trying to fake a ground texture for a DWC by bumping up the scale for a mottled look...?
When i said major bug I meant that its a major bug with my setup lol, not for everyone.
Here goes.
1: Im using the built in textures of SU. They all turn into multicolored, almost pixel looking stuff.
2: There are NO plugins installed.
3: It does this with EVERY model and EVERY texture, but the exact same file renders perfectly fine on my grandfathers PC (finally let me build him one, and I got him into SU)
4: Fresh install of SU. I deleted everything relating to SU and saved my plugins on the desktop.

This obviously means its not a problem with SU right? I didnt get a chance to check my drivers the other day when I posted this, so I am upgrading them right now. Hopefully that will fix it.

Ok, this is a recent thing. I have uninstalled and deleted all the folders concerning SU several times and reinstalled the program... to no avail. I have done everything I can think short of reinstalling XP Pro. What happens is my textures dont show up properly.. at all. Using the shaded view works fine, but no texture. But shaded WITH textures gives me this (sorry in advance for a large image):

Maybe Im missing something? It like just started doing it, with no changes made to the system. I havent changed drivers or anything since loooong before this started, but ill go check that in a second.