Many things have transpired since the last update; It's almost April, I've grown a beard, and a worldwide pandemic has caused all nonessential places of work and school to close. Communication with a few professors and a building manager confirmed my greatest fear of all this: Classes have not only gone online only, but the entire campus is being locked up until further notice. It was of my understanding that students would at least be able to go on campus if necessary. Meaning that the labs, in which house computers strong enough to get renders done in sufficient time and have licenses for the programs needed to do the projects in the first place, are completely locked up until further notice. It was said to happen April 1st, but it ended up being March 26th and only professors and faculty being allowed to get absolutely necessary items from their offices in Griffen Hall.
With all of this happening, the focus of this semester's project has to shift. Originally it was to touch up my portfolio by bringing good projects up to snuff and making a new project or two to be at a quality ready for professional display, and then display those on an ArtStation or Sketchfab page. With the loss of access to the Adobe suite and beefed up utility PC, high definition rendering and texturing have become close to impossible from home. My current in-progress PC, that can be used as a substitute for the lab's PCs, lacks parts. The parts would be easy to acquire, if only my place of work hadn't shut down, leaving me without income for the foreseeable future. The last major issue is that, due to a mishap with a student delinking (on accident) the school Adobe accounts on numerous lab computers, some (like myself) were forced to sign in again. Not a big deal, only that when I logged in again it created another account that was not linked to NKU's Adobe enterprise account. Meaning that my Adobe Creative Cloud account, created with my school email, does not have a single license for any Adobe product. I contacted Adobe support via email and the "live chat", I have the train wreck of transcripts from those conversations of over 13 hours trying to resolve the issue and it going nowhere.
Pardon my Australian but this Cock-up-Cascade has lead to the decision, on my end, to just improve the models/scenes themselves and make new models/scenes only. The number of models/scenes originally planned has also been reduced, but I hope that I can stay on the original four planned. I know that was a lot of build up for such a sentence of news, but it is a very important topic.
Stay safe and healthy, God bless.
~Joey Niehaus