Because our tutorials are featuring also materials and rendering setup we decided to build or own library and use this library in the final step of the tutorials where we apply materials to the model and render. This library should save us and you time by watching the tutorials and also it will provide a base of basic material which you can use in other render. The materials are simple and we are sure that users can do better or they can download better from some other source, but this is not the main reason for the library, the main reason is to cut off the time by rendering in our tutorials.

Over the last few months I was thinking how and especially what i will change in my routine to be able to work on 3D-Sphere and finally release new tutorials and write some new articles and reviews. The truth is that my reasons for „pausing“ the work here was more than objectively, I became a father :). Now, if you are a parent you will understand that from this moment you have time only for your child and your try to use all of your free time to be with her or him and enjoy it. Hence, I decided to take a little break from here and focus on what is more important. Of course I came here from time to time, did some minor work, and so on but it really wasn’t anything which would bring new content here. As the time was passing and with it grew my child I decided to get back and restart the work here. Hmmm, the first try I made didn’t end up as I planned from the point of tutorials but at least I did a major upgrade to the site with a new design, new core at lots of improvements to make it faster, more attractive and light. 

After a longer time of being a bit passive at 3D-Sphere we are restarting the work here. The main reason for this was the fact that i had my wedding before me. Everyone who experienced this social occasion will agree with me that it’s one of the busiest times full of arranging lots of things. Now the wedding is behind me and iam officially a husband J. Of course iam a bit sorry for not uploading tutorials, recording new ones and overall working more on the quality of this web-site. Still I had to choose my priority here and of course it was my wife. I hope all users will understand the reasons why it was so and look forward on the changes we are preparing.

At first we restarting the work on the „Material library“ which we announced a long time ago but hadn’t enough time to finish it. As I mentioned before we want to create a larger „Material libary“ with materials for different applications and plugins starting with MentalRay. Still, we are waiting for a new release of the download system we would like to use and in the meantime we are preparing the actual material which would be present inside the library.

As you know by migrating to the streaming server we observed a small problem with the player causing by a pause-play event a lag which can either start infinity buffering or a video-sound shift for some short time. Trying to find what exactly is causing the problem we found that on both streaming server and the player is a small bug. Now, before I will explain a bit deeper about the problem and the workaround I will mention again the technology we are using here for playing the videos. The streaming server isn’t anything which isn’t use normally used on the web. Actually this Adobe Streaming server or technology is one of the most used in the world and even Amazon using this kind of streams. It allows what the name stands for and instead of progressive download the streaming server stream video, so you download only what you watch and you can seek to any part of the video without waiting for the player to download it. The reasons why we choose this solution I mentioned few times before and I will not repeat this again. The player which we use is Flowplayer, again it’s one of the most used player around and developed for several years. Looking on both of these solutions you just can’t claim to us that this is bad or wrong, the solution and technology is ok, but as usually, bugs occurs. The good news is, we are trying to solve the bugs on the side of the server and I really hope we will.