Bonobo Extreme

We returned our System76 Kudu Professional because it was very slow when editing more than 100,000 faces and vertices. We figured this was due to the integrated Intel graphics card.

We replaced it with a System76 Bonobo Extreme with the following hardware:

• nVidia GeForce GTX 870M with 6 GB & 1344 CUDA cores
• 16 GB RAM
• Intel i7-4810MQ (2.8 GHz, 4 cores)
• 17.3" 1920x1080 matte display
• Ubuntu 14.04 LTS 64 bit

So far, the new system works beautifully for Blender. It doesn't have any trouble editing and displaying complex objects with more than 100,000 faces/vertices. And it's a little bit faster than the Kudo (1:37 to render the BMW vs. 1:43).

GPU rendering is actually slower than the CPU rendering, but I think that's because I'm using an older driver (331.38 which is part of Ubuntu 14.04) instead of the latest which is designed for the GTX 870M card (340.32). I plan to try again once Ubuntu 14.10 is released in a few months.

One cool thing: The backlit keyboard is nice and you can cycle through different colors as in the pic at the right.

One not-so-cool thing: The touch pad is so large that it picks up my palm movement when typing and moves the cursor around, sometimes leading to bad typos. I usually just use a mouse connected with USB and turn off the touch pad with fn-F1.

Simple Animation

We just want to learn how to make a simple animation where the camera spins around an object.

First we tried this tutorial on camera animation here:

• This guy doesn't explain things nearly as well as the other guy!
• We gave up on this one because the method isn't a smooth circle around the object and he goes too fast to follow along

Next, we tried this one with a bendy clock and this one from Tutorial Brothers, but just ended up using pieces from each.

Here's the general process:

• add a curve--path
• scale the path with S, a number, and enter
• edit the mode by pressing Tab (the path gets arrows on it that shows the direction)
• select points on the path and pull it into a half circle
• move the path so it goes around the teddy bear (which is centered on the origin)
• select the camera and then the path (with shift-right-click), then ctrl-P and select follow path
• move the camera so it's at the start of the path, rotate it so it points towards the bear (NumPad-0 shows the camera view)
• Do the same (follow path, move to beginning of curve but behind camera) for both light sources
• Set the length of the animation to 100
• Set the output (under render, on right-hand side) to png
• Press animation and it will create a picture for each frame to be assembled later

We later used the above process to add a bezier circle which then became the path all the way around the bear. We modified the number of frames in the circle with the properties--curve section (when the circle was selected).

To assemble the pictures into a video, the best tutorial we found was this one on BlenderDiplom by Gottfried Hofman. Not only does he show how to make a video from images, he also shows how to add an audio track and fade it in and out--something we also used.

Here is the finished animation: