After upgrading to the GTX 260, I let my roommate borrow my old 8600 GT. After just a couple of months, three of the capacitors on that 8600 GT gave up the ghost with one loud bang and left this world through a newly opened “X” mark. With some help from my new friends at BadCaps.net I ordered new Rubycon capacitors and replaced the fautly FZ79 capacitors. With that the 8600 GT is back online and fully operational. Thanks guys!

Got a new treasure from eBay. I love RPPCs…

Florida State Bank & Forsyth St. Jacksonville, FLA.

Been working on this for a minute. Finally got it to a semi-viewable state. LWCAD has proven itself to be invaluable. I’m finding it hard to believe I did architectural modeling without it. Lots of detail to go for both modeling and texturing.

Adding to the ever-expanding archive of downtown photographs. Having a better camera helps with the motivation.

Took a good 6 mile walk today gathering more reference photos. The season has hit for my job so finding time to work on the project gets interesting.

Got a chance to upgrade a few components. Picked up a used EVGA GTX 260 from a buddy of mine (thanks Ripley!) and a new Corsair H50 CPU water cooling unit from FrozenCPU.com.

The Corsair H50 is actually a pretty sweet system if you want to get into a fairly inexpensive water cooling setup. I opted to get the Triebwerk 120mmx120mmx55mm fan to go with it. This fan is pretty stellar. Since the radiator on the H50 is made for 120mm fans, it presented an interesting dilemma for me as I have only 92mm case fans. This was easily overcome by using a 80/92mm to 120mm Fan Adapter. My radiator setup actually uses a push/pull to get air across it. The 92mm Gelid Solid fan is attached to the case, followed by the fan adapter, then the H50 radiator, and finally the Triebwerk fan.

The EVGA GTX 260 is a pretty great video card too. I upgraded from an 8600 GT and the difference is night and day. Which is a good thing because I’m starting to get quite a few poly to push around in Jax3D.

My average idle temps with the Cooler Master GeminII S  were around 34°C. With the H50 my idle temps average around 20°C, with 33-34°C load.

I recently acquired some historic photos for my 1926 project. Interestingly enough, I was able to acquire an aerial photograph of downtown from 1926.

Grabbed some more photos of the FEC Railway bridge yesterday with the DSLR. The resolution improvement over my old 5MP camera is pretty great.

Also with my 80-200mm lens, being able to zoom in and grab some detail over using digital zoom is a much needed improvement.

After beginning to model the bridge, I found areas that I did not have reference photos for so I did not know how to model those details, which I knew would happen. The entire process is progressively getting smoother as I go, partially due to the development of a production flow and to the additional tools.

I’ve begun working on this bridge. LWCAD has helped immensely with the process so far. It’s just beginning but already off to a good start.

Geez, didn’t realize it’s been so long since posting here. Guess I should at least post something before the year’s out. Not much progress lately on Jax3D, but Viktor Veličko did release a new update to LWCAD which is pretty awesome. Still haven’t sat down to learn all the tools, but I’m working on it.