Craig Ramsay

Hi Gerhard, sorry they are both gone now

Hey guys, I'm just putting the feelers out to see if anyone is interested in a license of Vray 3.x with 5 nodes or PDPlayer? I've moved away from working in the 3D industry so these are no longer required. Open to sensible offers. Thanks Craig

I'd use Irradience Map rather than Light Cache for your primary bounces.

I'm very pleased to announce that on Thursday April 12th we'll be launching the first 3DS Max Edinburgh User Group meeting at Edinburgh's Outhouse Bar. Catering for the hobbyist to the professional user, we're providing a platform for 3DS Max users to show off their work, learn and discuss techniques, and listen to top industry artists talk about their work. It should be a fun evening... everyone is welcome and I hope to see some of you there! Speakers for the 12th April will be - Jamie Gwilliam - Autodesk Andy Pennington - Graven Images James Mooney - Render Nation Fore more information please visit http://www.3dsedinburgh.co.uk **Competition** - Our good friends at 3Dconnexion have very kindly given us a SpaceMouse Pro to give away to one of you lucky lot! You have until April 11th to enter and the winner will be drawn on April 12th at the 3DS Edinburgh event. For details on how to enter, please visit or website. - Craig

Do you still have distributed rendering on when you send submit the scene to backburner? If so then turn it off and the rest of your machines should get picked up by backburner.

+1 for Outliner, I use it every day!

Martin, one of the original owners of Materialwerk has released a new series of plugins that do a lot of similar things to Brix - http://www.vizpark.com/

Not had time to try this yet but it might be what you're looking for - http://labs.autodesk.com/utilities/geppetto/

Not so sure it's as good a deal as that in the UK. I'm a one man band and use CS4 Production Premium at the moment. Looking at the subscription price it would cost me £1095.48 per year to keep up to date, that's $1,695.87 AUD and $1,711.82 USD. Sound like a fair price? That's over double what I pay each year for my 3DS Max subscription. A Photoshop subscription on it's own here would cost £565.08 per year ($874.983 AUD & $883.871 USD). I wonder why Adobe products are so much more expensive in the UK than the rest of the world? I can't help feeling that companies like this are pricing out the little man. No wonder there's a massive problem with piracy! Rant over!

Was pretty shocked to read this today, especially as I'm still using CS4 and wasn't going to upgrade until CS6 is released - Quote: "If you’ve been waiting to upgrade Photoshop CS3 or CS4 to CS6 when it’s released sometime next year, here’s some bad news: the upgrade price won’t apply to you. Starting with CS6, Adobe will be enforcing a new upgrade policy: [...] we are changing our policy for perpetual license customers. In order to qualify for upgrade pricing when CS6 releases, customers will need to be on the latest version of our software (either CS5 or CS5.5 editions). If our customers are not yet on those versions, we’re offering a 20% discount through December 31, 2011 which will qualify them for upgrade pricing when we release CS6. The existing policy is that customers with software from three versions back quality for upgrade pricing. For example, owners of CS2, CS3, and CS4 and upgrade to CS5. Buying the full version of Photoshop CS5 right now costs nearly $500, while the upgrade is only priced at ~$150." http://bit.ly/rFx0Wu

Yeah, I got a bit of a shock when I was pricing up new drives for a server yesterday. Ip pretty sure prices have gone up around 40% from a few weeks ago!

Are you sure an accountant is the best person to do this for you? I'd have thought a solicitor would be a better bet. Believe it or not, £650 to have a good contract drawn up for you is pretty cheap! It's one of these things that you really don't want to scrimp on. Craig

Stef, If you're using Vray 2.0 you could use a VrayMultiSubTex map for the diffuse and animate the material ID with a material modifier.

+1 for Render Nation. Great support and they will do some test frames for you to make sure everything is working the way you want it to. Remember to leave enough time to download your frames or get them sent to you on DVD's - 7000 frames isnt going to be a quick download, especially if you're rendering HD with render elements.

Hi Alain, The first thing I noticed is you are a computer animation graduate but you only have still image work in your show-reel... might be a good idea to include some animations work too. I think it would be worth your time to study some of the images that the other guys are doing here. In my opinion, your images seem quite empty and a bit flat. Adding lots of people and other entourage might help make your work look a bit more polished. Best of luck with the job hunt