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.

I recently acquired a Pentax DSLR of Craig’s List and I’m quite impressed. It’s a K200D and is a serious upgrade from my old Nikon CoolPix 5400. Additionally, I have owned an old Pentax K1000 for the past 19 years that I have additional lenses for that fit on the K200D, with one caveat: If you have Pentax compatible lenses they will need a slight modification. Thanks to SelrahCharleS on dpreview.com for providing the walk through for this adjustment.

In addition to having twice the megapixels of my old camera, there aren’t enough nice words to be said about photographing in RAW format. The JPEG of the image in this post that was shot simultaneously with the RAW was much darker, has more shadows, and is considerably less saturated in color. All of which can be adjusted in Photoshop but not to the same degree as having the RAW file.

I currently have an archive of approximately 2,000 photos of downtown Jacksonville. Unfortunately 98% of that archive is not made up of RAW photos. I’m not interested in reacquiring my entire archive, but from here on out it will be another story.