Diablo3

Blizzard has been hosting teaser splash pages the last few days leading to the Worldwide Invitational and it's official - Diablo3 is coming:


Perhaps from some Wow influence, it seems more skill based with a recognizable skill hotbar. Does that mean UI mods will be allowed? Wow mechanics in a real game would be something to look forward to. It always seemed to me that they could easily take the Wow engine and build a game out of it - like, a real game.


Each character class gets a male and female version as well, look familiar?

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Mold-making

I gave away all but one of the moyashimon and have been thinking about learning to cast again. I bought this stuff called InstaMold at Michaels and experimented with it a little.


Don't let the "just add water" and "E" for easy fool you, this stuff does not work as advertised. I mixed the "strong" ratio which was supposed to set in 3 minutes and after 10 hours the mold still had not set. So far, absolute failure.

It is interesting to note that this stuff is endothermic. After 10 hours, it was still wet, but very cold to the touch and the surrounding air noticeably cooler. Perhaps hot water is needed to start a reaction, but cold tap water just didn't work at all. A quick google suggests this stuff is junk.

So now I'm thinking it might actually be easier to make a push mold out of sculpey itself. At least I know I can push an object into soft sculpey and bake it, so long as it doesn't have any undercuts (which none of these do) and the object can be removed. Not sure how much detail it will retain, but I think it's worth a try this weekend.

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[wip] Fun with Sculpey

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[ 06.01.08 ]

I wanted to find out how Sculpey behaves when cured so decided to try something simple:


Rolled out the parts and baked them for 15 minutes. The result is something a bit softer than resin, but very workable - not tacky, easily sanded and drilled. I pinned the parts like a normal resin kit and found that the surface bond when tacky is very fragile when cured. Each of the blocks in the antennae broke apart with slight force and had to be glued. This is actually a good thing, since it means it should be easier to make parts fitted together and seperate them after curing.


Oryzae-tan, about 2.5cm tall. Finishing it from here on would be just like doing a regular resin kit.

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After wet sanding, antennae rounded and mouth filled in with some putty. On top of a penny for size reference.


I need to wait for the putty to cure to work on the mouth and also cure the base. I'm going to finish painting him and set him on my monitor at work. :D

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[ 06.03.08 ]

Let's brew!! I decided to make more oryzae-tans and thought about making a mould to cast them, but I've never done casting and they're so small I'm not sure how to layout the mould. It was easier to just sculpt more and each one is slightly different which gives them some character.


Fresh from the oven, here they are stuck to my work lamp. I embeded a 1/16" NdFeB magnet into each base so they will stick to any metal surface, at any angle, even upside down. I think these will do for now. I'll sand down the new ones and then start painting.

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[ 06.05.08 ]

And some friends...

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[ 06.08.08 ]

I accidentally let some paint dry in my airbrush for a few days. After painting Satsuki, I wanted to clean it in the ultrasonic, but got caught up in taking photos and left it on the counter. It took a few days of soaking in cleaner before I could dislodge the dried paint, but it's back in service now and the spray pattern looks about the same as before.


Base coat sprayed with white mixed in a sealer. It seems that paint adheres to sculpey slightly different than resin, so I had to spray in even thinner layers to avoid droplets beading up. This will get a light sanding when cured and then the actual colors will go on.

You might have noticed I bought a new cutting mat. I left some uncured sculpey on my old mat (the purple one) and it reacted with the mat surface. There are warnings on sculpey to not place it uncured on fine furniture, but it seems to react to a lot of surfaces. The warning should probably be don't place uncured sculpey on anything you don't want damaged. It doesn't react to aluminum foil, so I've been placing it on foil since.

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[ 06.19.08 ]

I've been testing out the new PC by playing Orange Box, which had been sitting in my steam account for ages, thus neglecting these little guys. I finally sprayed on the colors tonight:


I don't think I'll shade them as they look like claymation figures, which is the idea - plus this little project was just for me to figure out how to work with sculpey.

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[ 06.21.08 ]

Eyes painted, assembled and sprayed with Future to seal. Too glossy though, so they'll get a flat finish later and be done. They like hanging around my work lamp.. shoo!


If you are wondering what these things are, they are micro-organisms from Moyashimon.

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[ complete ]

They're finished here. Kaien wins one of the oryzae-tans for commenting on my blog. ^o^

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New Gaming PC

I had the opportunity to acquire a new wolfdale CPU at discount and decided it was time to build a new PC. It's been about 7 years since I stopped building computers and my last two were pre-built from Dell over 5 years ago (hyperthreaded P4s!). They still work great, but are slow by current standards and won't keep up with the latest games. So here's what I've put together:

Intel C2D E8400 3GHz
Asus P5KC
Nvidia 8800GT 512
Geil Ultra 1066 PC8500 2x1G
CM 80+ RS-650W

Recycled an old ATX mini tower case and it booted first try. The Geils, however, don't run at the rated speed - the SPD is 800MHz cas5 and they will run at 950MHz, but not stable and they won't POST past 1GHz no matter what (even bumping to 2.4v with looser timings as Geil claims will work). They simply do not, so could have saved some money with cheaper PC6400 (since that's what they really are) or a more compatible brand.

During this exercise, I found what I really miss is the simplicity of the Dell clamshell cases. Too bad Dell uses all proprietary parts, so the cases can't be re-used. I've never felt cramped installing parts into the Dells, which are even smaller than the standard ATX mini tower, yet they feel so roomy when opened. Meanwhile, I swear up and down at the crappy ATX cases - if Dell would only design a clamshell that takes standard ATX parts.

The E8400 is a overclocking beast. It will run at 4GHz on air, but the cores run too hot for comfort without a better cooler. With just the stock cooler, 3.6GHz seems to be the sweet spot - the cores hit 65C under 100% load at 1.2v and passes Prime95 overnight. While in acceptable range, that's still a bit hot to me, so I'm going to try an Arctic Freezer cooler.

I'm already happy with the performance so far and total cost was $465. Now, off to re-install all the software..... ^^;;;;

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Installed an Arctic Freezer 7 Pro and bumped it up to 3.8GHz at 1.25v - the cores max at 60C on prime torture test overnight. Typical gaming load sits between 50-55C and it is very stable.

I was sad to see the PowerEdge 400SC get gutted though, so I decided to experiment with Ubuntu XBMC. I put the original 256MB and 40GB drive back into the box and installed Xubuntu and LXBMC. It streams up to 720p content at about 70% on both "cores" (hyper-threaded), but can't keep up with 1080p content. It also lags on some mkv subtitles with lots of text, but at this stage, it's quite usable as an extra network media player. I needs to get a little more stable though before I replace the xbox, as I can crash it pretty easily.

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