shaneis

The god of rammed earth sustainable building - Michael Reynolds! http://earthship.com/

It's a bit odd to get used to 3D viewport navigation with a tablet. Photoshopping is easier. Give it a try - your Photoshop experience will improve, whether or not your 3D will improve is up to the individual. Maybe, maybe not. A word to the wise when selecting your tablet size - if you draw "from the wrist", then an A5 would be a better option whereas if you draw "from the shoulder", then an A4 would be a better match.

Dead Can Dance - you'd have heard them on the film Baraka

Think just a little bit harder - wouldn't a primitive cube be a fair place to start? http://area.autodesk.com/tutorials?word=&where=1&software=1&tutotips=108&level=40

Just to throw my 2c in the pot... The squealing noise is most likely the bearings/ bushes in your HDD cooling unit. Nothing too major to worry about. May as well just remove that unit all together. As far as the HDD question goes - yes, you can easily put a new drive into the same case and copy the files from the old drive. Only thing to remember is to plug ne new one in as "master" and the old one as "slave". Pop the XP disc in and boot to it, then install. However... To avoid the most evil situation where you accidentally format your old drive and inadvertently infect your new drive, I'd do it this way: FIRST - Back-up all of your data and settings to your external drive/ cloud space and then Take your PC off-line! SECOND - a. Remove old drive, b. Attach new drive, c. Insert XP disc, boot to it and do a fresh install, d. Install all of your "anti-everything" software, e. Jump online and update all "anti-everything", f. Update Winders, g. Restore your data and settings from your external backup, h. Power off, unplug, earth yourself and plug the old drive into the "slave" slot i. Scan your old drive with your "anti-everything" software, j. Check that everything is restored correctly on your new drive against your old drive, k. Once you're satisfied that everything is as it should be, check again. l. Now you can format the old one. m. When all is done, do a brand new back up of your new, clean(ish) system The reason I urge to do the bulk of this off-line is illustrated in the graph below... (current survival time for an unpatched Winders install online - 42 minutes - less than the time it takes to install, update and patch an XP install...nasty!) (source: SANS Internet Storm Center, "Survival Time" http://isc.sans.org/survivaltime.html)

Simple answer: Calibrate your monitors and get a hard-proof. Long Answer: If you're able to say that all of your images are produced on monitors that are regularly calibrated and you have hard proofs done, then there really isn't anything else to say. You have provided them with the best possible quality, you've proofed it, you can't do any better than that and as your images are ready for print, your hands are clean. A simple explanation should suffice - you have to calibrate regularly to ensure that your monitors display as true an image as possible. Unless they have their displays calibrated with some form of regularity, then they'll never be able to view the image in it's correct state. If they don't believe you, show them the hard proof. It's always intrigued me... that someone can print a photo at home using crappy copy paper and a cheap bubble jet printer, then have the same photo printed at a lab and see - before their very eyes - the evidence that their equipment makes crappy reproductions. Yet, when it come to monitors or projectors they can't see the same relationship between their cheap, uncalibrated displays and calibrated professional quality displays. The guys I use for printing refuse to send a run to print without having a hard proof approved by their artist and designer clients... which works well, because the artists and designers won't approve a run unless they've seen a hard proof. Once you've been using the same print people for a while, you really don't need to hard proof as much - you'll know what you need to do at your end to get the right results. On a similar note, once you have a good relationship with your printers (i.e. you are a good customer) they'll probably hard proof for free if the final job will go to print. If the final will be a digital file, they may charge a small fee for a hard proof. (Tip: Have them do all of your office stationery as well and you're well on the way to being a good customer ) Through trial and error, I have completely given up on soft proofing with clients. My printers do a small hard proof for me and that's what I use for approvals. If the clients want digital, I'll send that. If they query it, I can then show them a hard proof - which (funily enough) becomes proof that their displays are up-to-$#!+. No one argues Apparently not

Not so, it's just that when talking monitors there are trade-offs with most makes and models. It's more a case of "...it's like everything else, pay for quality, get quality". That being said, buying an Eizo will snag you a monitor to drool over. Actually, best not to drool over it, they are expensive http://www.eizo.com/na/index.html Next best option would be something from NEC's professional (colour critical) range. http://www.necdisplay.com/ Both Eizo and NEC produce monitors suitable for colour critical/ soft-proof/ medical/ scientific environments. They are both at the higher end of the market but the benefits of accuracy and time saved between yourself and print/ digital publishing will soon put you on the right side of ROI. Also consider that others in your workplace can utilise your monitor if they need to check or proof work.

All in all, quite good. There's a problem with the shadows from the fork at bottom right and your forks are flat -not a huge problem but it makes them all look odd... and you glassware should be above the knives, not the forks. It is a restaurant after all, may as well set the tables correctly.

Head over here http://www.kenrockwell.com/nikon/index.htm to get up to speed. Ken can geek-out at times but he does write an honest and detailed review. Have fun with your new lens. I have an 18-200 VR as well - it may not be the best lens in technical terms, but it does live up to the "Swiss Army Knife" moniker. There's nothing worse than being at the right place at the right time with the wrong lens

That would depend entirely on what you're doing. If you're rendering medium-weight scenes with medium-weight textures, then 8GB will do you just fine. If, however, you regularly render heavy scenes with multiple displacements and high-res textures, then you'll need more RAM ~ 12-16GB. The most important thing to remember about RAM is this... If you need more, you can always get more. There's no point investing in 16GB unless you know you'll be using it. It's better to buy a Mac Pro with the minimum amount of RAM, then buy some 3rd party RAM to bring you up to 8GB. Test it for a week or so and then if you're renders are topping-out the RAM, buy some more. Otherwise, save the money and buy a nice red wine to celebrate... you'll be saving hundreds of $$$.

The Mac Pro will be faster for rendering (I'm assuming that's what you're asking?!). iMac Quad - 4 cores hyper-threaded, effective 8 cores Mac Pro Dual Quad - 8 cores hyper-threaded, effective 16 cores. Provided you can afford the premium, the Mac Pro would be a much better choice for a production machine. iMacs aren't designed as a production machine, they're designed for home and normal business use. There's a thread on this forum somewhere that talks about RAM for Macs - in short, don't buy your RAM through Apple as it's way over-priced. Search around on http://forums.mactalk.com.au/ or the Whirlpool site for Mac Pro options specific to Australia... http://forums.whirlpool.net.au/forum/?action=threads_search&f=38&q=RAM http://forums.whirlpool.net.au/forum-replies.cfm?t=1302452 Here's a decent guide to the various things you should consider when configuring a Mac Pro... http://macperformanceguide.com/Mac-HowToConfigureAMacPro.html Have fun with your new Mac

Quicktime X was released with Snow Leopard (OS X 10.6). As for reports about .mov inside Win 7, that may well be true. It just means that MS has tapped the libavcodec library from the FFmpeg project (open source). However, the features that were originally unlocked by purchasing QT Pro would still be locked and most still are in QT X under Snow Leopard. The only truly new feature in Quicktyime X is the ability to record a screencast directly to a .mov from QT X (very cool and handy feature, I might add). A Snow Leopard user wishing to access all of the old QT Pro capabilities still needs to install a legacy version from the Snow Leopard disc. http://www.apple.com/macosx/technology/#quicktimex http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quicktime#QuickTime_X If I was to take a guess at when the PC world will have access to QT X and when the "Pro" features are integrated, I'd be looking somewhere around the Macworld 2010 Expo, which has been scheduled for 11th February, 2010... but that's just a guess.

Hardly, I really don't think Mr Jobbs is ready to let that happen any time soon - hahaha, I can just imagine the headlines... "Windows 7 kills Quicktime & iTunes! Millions trading-in iPods for ZuneHD" Honestly, Joel! Sometimes I wonder about you .mov is a proprietary format, so Quicktime X (which is 64-bit) should give you a 64-bit solution for Windows...once it's ported. From Wikipedia, "Ars Technica revealed that Quicktime X uses Quicktime 7.x via QTKit to run older codecs that have not made the transition to 64-bit. The status of QuickTime X's port to Windows and Mac OS X v10.5 "Leopard" is currently unknown."

That's the way I've always understood it for use in MR. If you're having no luck, you could try a work-around by pre-calculating the displaced mesh, scale it to fit, save the mesh out and use it as a proxy. Might even help with render times too... Just a thought. S.

I'd lose or at least reduce the chromatic aberration and smooth the head rest in the foreground. Nasty looking boardroom - you just know it's going to be the birthplace of a thousand redundancies.