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Saturday, February 2 2013

By Olivier Saraja on Saturday, February 2 2013, 10:24 - Freedom and Open Sourceness

Linux Mint, MATE and fonts

Well Ok. The appearance of MATE was not so appealing at first to me. Mostly because I spend a lot of time on LibreOffice Writer, and that both the system fonts and the rendering of the fonts in LibreOffice were quite disappointing.

In fact, it is quite easy to  change the default behavior, so that the fonts rendering is way more sexy on my LCD 23" Samsung SyncMaster BX2331.

Capture_01.png

1- Enter MATE's Control Center.

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2-In the Personal section, select the Appearance Option and go in the Fonts tab. Pick fonts that suit your eyes :-) or keep the original ones. I went for the Liberation fonts series.

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3-In the Details button, select the Sub-pixel anti-aliasing compatible with a LCD monitor, and get rid of any Optimization.

All the fonts, system and applications wide are now nicely rendered: less tiredness, more comfort, better efficiency for a writer!

Friday, February 1 2013

By Olivier Saraja on Friday, February 1 2013, 21:41 - Blender news

9

Blender, GPU Computing on Linux Mint 14

At last, I have a decent state-of-the-art PC computer for Blender.

Basically, here are the specs (http://www.ldlc.com/fiche/PB00127585.html):

  • Second generation Quad-Core Intel Core i7 (Intel Core i7-3820 - 3.6/3.9 GHz)
  • Motherboard Asus P9X79 (Intel X79 Express)
  • 16 GB DDR3-SDRAM PC3-12800 (1600 MHz)
  • SSD 120 GB Serial ATA 6Gb/s
  • 1 To Serial ATA 6Gb/s 7200Trs/min
  • NVIDIA GeForce GTX 660Ti 2 GB Graphic Card
  • Noctua NH-D14 SE2011 Fan
  • Audio 8 channels HD with THX TruStudio support
  • 650W LDLC Quality Select TA-650 80PLUS Bronze power
  • Blu-ray reader/ DVD writer Super Multi DL Silent medium tower Corsair Obsidian 550D

LD0001171752_2.jpg

Of course, it runs Linux Mint 14 MATE with nvidia proprietary drivers and CUDA toolkit.


My tests was to render one of my previous doodles, using Cycles (128 samples, 50% of 1920x1080 resolution).


04-modelisation-exemple_spin.png

It was originally rendered on a small Macbook Air 13" of Mid-2011 in 2min35s.


With this new computer running Linux Mint 14 on its Quad-Core Intel Core i7 threaded (e.g; 8 cores), it was rendered in 0min48s with tiles 64x64.


Finally but not least, using the CUDA Toolikt, the render last only 0min25s (twice as less!) with Tiles 64x64 and 0min17s with tiles 256x256 (almost thrice as less!).

I really wonder how I could use Cycles before on a dual-core not GPU computing enabled :-)

Saturday, January 19 2013

By Olivier Saraja on Saturday, January 19 2013, 11:53 - 3D gallery

1

Booooring! Springs

Yet another doodling. This time with Blender's Screw function, and some play with Cycles shaders for copper, brass and steel simulation.

04-modelisation-exemple_screw.png

Blender 2.65a, Cycles 128 samples, all textures from good ol' Blender Texture Disc

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