John Dollus

the basic way is to think of it as background-midground-foreground. Render out and paint up 3 images to layer in Fusion. by scaling, moving, blurring each layer independently and/or at different rates, you can pull off the dolly parallax effect quite easily like the dining room shot in the linked vid. I'd suggest starting there and then explore more sophisticated composites. By doing the above and tossing in an animated door layer or a rotating ceiling fan, you can cut down on a ton of render time.

max converts units for you. just type it in as shown and it will display the decimal

I don't usually recommend relying upon plugins but Mettle for After Effects is perfect for this application. With a spherical background, it should be super easy to figure out the camera placement.

switch to the schematic material editor and give that a shot

The cities are pretty much are on their own around here. Each governing county has different guidelines/proclamations so it's a bit confusing. Some have restaurants open and others have everything closed up except for life-sustaining businesses with a mix of in-between all within only a few kilometers of each other. As a staunch introvert, I pretty much self-quarantine all the time so it hasn't impacted me much at all except I save a lot of time and fuel now that I don't have to go into the office to do what I could do from my living room anyway. Makes me wonder if this will stop the 'open office' style of design? desks have been getting smaller and smaller with people crammed closer and closer for years now.

No drop off in demand but projects being pushed back by 3-5 days or so while others make accommodations. I'm an introverted gypsy so kinda fine on my end. I just opened up my home to a couple coworkers since I have a much better fiber pipe here and we have a sorta co-working space setup. For Max, we have checked out licenses so it doesn't have to pull from the office server.

I did in the past. It wasn't much to get an umbrella professional liability policy. Most people know suing illustrators for a failed development/project is like getting blood from a stone but people can be pretty rubbish sometimes so it's worth the peace of mind in my opinion.

If you just get a tablet, you could sculpt equally on the 'home base' desktop as well as your mobile platform. The medium sized wacom works great for this and packs just as well as a book. Why cripple your processing power for pressure sensitivity? The benefit of a Surface is being able to work while mobile for lightweight graphic apps (airport, train, plein aire work etc) but it lacks robust hardware demanded of pretty much everything beyond SketchUp.

Quickest and most efficient way is through proper budgeting and project planning. Make sure to tell your client that. Also, Look into Cinema4D's MoGraph.

Does it behave that way in both CPU and GPU engines?

You aren't alone in your frustration with the shifting policies- http://artofsoulburn.blogspot.com/2020/02/rip-soulburnscripts-for-3dsmax.html

add it as a test only. If it fixes it, then you know it's a sampling issue. If it doesn't, then it's more a problem with your light source on the right or something else. what happens when you render it to an exr file and open in photoshop? is the dithering still apparent or does it change/shift?

looks like a combination of a couple things. Add a low power light off to the left as a fill light and see if that takes care of it.

This is a rather nomadic industry so you will need to expand your search area for establishing your career. Sanders Studio in Cornwall is hiring for mid-level positions. After a bit of time there, perhaps transfer to their London office. Personally, I'm in the States in the Architecture side and pretty much won't hire anyone just to do renderings any more. It's more of a secondary benefit to a primary role.