Lovecraft Forest

Red Ring of Death

Jan 27

Posted by Kerwin in Ramblings | No Comments

Don’t let anyone tell you that Xbox 360 Elites are immune that that most ubiquitous of Xbox360 hardware problems: the infamous Red Ring of Death. We’ve all heard of it, where the Xbox sullenly displays three red lights in the front and nothing but nothing seems to be able to bring it back to life except sending it off to Redmond for repairs.

It happened to mine just after Christmas. The machine being more than a year old, Microsoft wanted to charge me for repairs, so I was more inclined to find what was going on. I looked at a number of remedies, many intriguing to out and out bizarre. A common thread seemed to be that forced overheats might bring the device back to life. More investigation yielded that most Red Ring of Death (RROD) problems are caused by a connection failure between CPU and GPU.

The fix to the problem for me (actually Mathue did most of the work, I just did the research) turned out to be correcting a flaw in the basic Xbox360 design–the way heat sinks are held in place–a problem that remains in the Elite model the same as the basic model. This is not a project for the faint of heart and requires some technical knowledge. If you’re not comfortable working inside of electronics, the fix best be left to technician. The current mounting system in Xbox360′s does not prevent the very hot CPUs and GPUs from deforming in their surface connection with the mother board and the fix is to assure that the chips a tightly sandwiched between the heat sinks and the mother board.

While usually skeptical of these things, you can either search out on you tube some ideas of how to replace the heat sink bracketing system with steel screws/bolts some good info here.) You will also need to re-heat with a hairdryer or heat gun some key components to re-establish their connection with the mother board. This is a delicate operation. I ultimately paid the $25 for information from http://3redlightfix.com/. While their information is pricey, it does appear to work and does provide you with step-by-step info for finding you way around the Xbox360 interior.

The Xbox360 is the machine for Halo3, but I have not found that it is a well built machine. Maybe they’ll get it right with Windows7 on the Xbox720. :)

After about three weeks of testing, I find that fix keeps things going for a while, but it does not seem to be as permanent a fix as we could hope for. I find that the fix needs to be repeated too frequently as the thermal problems will likely continue. The only permanent fix would have to come from Microsoft in the form of a better design.

-K

Tags: xbox360

Zbrush Mechanical Part 10, Parts from Parts

Jan 25

Posted by Kerwin in 3D | No Comments

This isn’t really a Zbrush tip, per se, but I’m often surprised by frustrated modelers when they hit a wall saying, “This is way too complex!” What they sometimes have failed to notice, in the pursuit of efficient modeling is that complex machines are often built out of assemblies which are made of subassemblies which are made up of even smaller sub-assemblies and ultimately out of individual (often cast) parts. Observation of existing machines (and even disassembling a few) can improve your mechanical modeling. To approach this piece of a leg, I didn’t start with the whole piece. Instead, I recognized the sides were (at least in my concept sketch) just a mirrored pair of simple subassemblies. A couple of cylinders and box (suitable beveled by masking and inflating.

Thanks to subtools, I only had to make one cylinder and one box which makes the basic strutSince I don’t plan to take this apart, I went ahead and merged these into a single tool–if I thought I would need to edit the diameters of the cylinders or something, I might have left these in pieces to adjust them. (I do bend them, but fortunately I don’t need them in pieces for that. To build up more of my machine part, I then take two of the assemblies plus a hollow cylinder to build up my next subassembly.

I haven’t built out some super machine with this yet (it will probably be the shin of some mechanical dinosaur when I’m done with it) but you get the idea–work with bite-sized parts and pretty quickly you can get some complex machinery (even without sophisticated texturing.) This whole mechanical part was really created with just 3 simple forms, suitably scaled, deformed, and positioned.

Add a few more assemblies:

Tags: Zbrush

Kylemore Abby

Jan 23

Posted by Kerwin in Photography | No Comments

Connenara Region, Ireland

Tags: Ireland

ZBrush Mechanical Part 9, Instant Greeble

Jan 21

Posted by Kerwin in 3D | No Comments

This trick really isn’t mine as much as a simplification of Lemonnado’s excellent tutorial on making Greebles with masks (Zeebles). (You can view the full tutorial here.) The point I want to show you here is that UV’s can play a very helpful role in making repeating detail. Here we take a simple form, made up of a few polygons, and decorate it with a repeating geometry with very little work.

Step 1) Go to the UV menu (or the Texture Menu in earlier versions of ZB3) and select the UVTile button. This will stack/overlap each polygon on top of the UV space. Normally, overlapping UV’s is a BadThing™, but in this case, this is exactly what we want.

Step 2) Subdivide the object to get lots of detail–about 1M polygons (8 levels)

Step 3) Go to the texture menu and select a texture that would look nice. A seamless texture will also look cool. I picked built-in Texture 13, which looks tailored made for Greebles. In one step, the whole object is covered with texture, 1 copy for each polygon at level 1

Step 4) Covert the texture to a mask by going to the Masking pallet and select “Mask by Intensity”. For clarity, you can turn the texture off if you want.