davehollands

I've tried a few different video training series - my opinion on this way of learning is still a bit undecided. I still believe the best way to learn is to try and figure it out yourself (read the manual!), rather than watching 7 hours of tutorials. HOWEVER, I bought a bunch of Viscorbel video training when he had like a 90% sale on - and honestly, it's fantastic. You're watching a master at work. His vray material series if incredible, really opened my eyes to what you can acheive with procedural ways of work, and he has a few series which cover the production of stunning interior and exterior scenes from start to finish, I would recommend this. It's honestly fantastic. Dude is a master 3d modeler too, check out some of his free tutorials. Check them out. http://viscorbel.com/product-category/premium-tutorials/

Just for a reference, I was looking at these "gaming" laptopt from pcspecialist when I wanted a mobile workstation - the price of this is roughly £2,200. For the same price you could build a tower with a watercooled intel 8 core 5960x cpu and 780ti. Chassis & Display Omega: 17.3" Matte Full HD LED Widescreen (1920x1080) Processor (CPU) Intel® Core™i7 Six Core Processor i7-4930K (3.4GHz) 12MB Cache Memory (RAM) 32GB KINGSTON SODIMM DDR3 1600MHz (4 x 8GB) Graphics Card 2 x AMD® Radeon® R9 M290X - 4GB DDR5 Video RAM - DirectX® 11 Memory - Hard Disk 120GB KINGSTON HYPERX 3K SSD, SATA 6 Gb/s (upto 555MB/sR | 510MB/sW) 2nd Hard Disk 1TB SERIAL ATA II 2.5" HARD DRIVE WITH 8MB CACHE (5,400rpm) I think these even man have IPS panels fitted - I'm not totally sure. If you're rendering for print you will absolutely need to do all your proofing and colour correcting on a calibrated IPS panel! TN panel suck for colour repro.

Does it have to be a laptop - how much is this one going to cost you? Processor is weak to be honest. Seeing as you could easily go for a hex-core tower for the price of a semi decent workstation laptop, you better have a bloody good reason to want a mobile workstation!

Hi guys - long time lurker first time poster here. I've been searching for the best + cheapest render node to support my i7 workstation for rendering for print, and came across this ebay store which sells refurbed dell dual xeon systems for under £200 - seems waaayyyy to good to be true, has anyone used these guys before or bought similar refurbed systems? I feel like i'm missing something. I was close to spending £500 on an amd fx 8 core node but for that price, I could get three of these - 24 cores baby! http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/Dell-Precision-490-Twin-Quad-Core-2-33Ghz-16GB-RAM-Barebones-Desktop-PC-Computer-/400678075201?pt=UK_Computing_DesktopPCs&hash=item5d4a463b41