GORK JOURNAL
Gork, computer smoke incident

3d December

Visualisation: Gork Studio
Client: A101 Development
Geo: Moscow, RU


On professional holidays, it’s customary to share professional tales. Mine happened exactly 7 years ago.

As I was having lunch and pondering how to meet all the impending tasks before the New Year, I received a call from the guys at the studio. "Kirill, your computer is smoking black smoke," they informed me in a very calm voice.

At the scene, there was a slight scent of burnt wires. The situation could have seemed funny, had it not been for the LA project that was only calculated on one computer. Naturally, on the one that had burnt out.

The decision was made to replace the power supply. Two hours later, a new PSU was in place. Due to inexperience, I didn’t pay attention to the pinout and supplied 12 volts to the motherboard instead of 6, which caused a very beautiful short-circuit spark to fly across the entire dual-socket board during power-up.

To give you an idea, urgently finding a dual-socket motherboard, two almost top-of-the-line Xeons at that time, and two out of eight RAM sticks in Nizhny was impossible. That’s exactly what got fried as a result of my mishandling of the PSU.

Saving the project and restoring the hardware cost me four very nerve-wracking trips to Moscow within a week, scouring through Gorbushkas, Regards, and other iron dens. But it all worked out. On the 29th-30th, we all breathed a sigh of relief, having submitted the renders.

Moral: The worst thing that can happen while working on a project is a Max crash without autosave and hardware problems. So, this 3D December, I wish you never face such problems. Happy holiday, dear 3D artists!
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