CarlAhearne

I use ipage and I have about 20 sites hosted with them, including Wordpress, Prestashop and a load of other sites and I've never had an issue. They are also among the cheapest for what you get;unlimited webspace, unlimited bandwidth, unlimited databases and they have a 1 click install for Wordpress which makes it super simple. Edit.. Just to add, I've used 1and1 and they are not cheap and not very helpful if you have a problem. Cancelling with them is also a nightmare.

The good thing about doing this by email is that you don't lose anything whatever happens; it doesn't cost you anything so even if you only get a couple of people interested, you've done it for nothing... I think companies have mixed opinions about how effective it is; some people will happily read the email and bear you in mind, other people will be busy and just ignore it. I'd say keep it brief and get the key info in the email. People may be too lazy to open the image/pdf so make sure they can get the important bits without opening it... Do you have a website? I'd certainly say it would be a good idea to have one, even if only very basic so that people can easily find out more.. Put a link in your email to your website and away you go.. Play the numbers game; send it out to a lot of people and see how it goes... Good luck and let us know hoe you get on...

Agree with the above, the bricks are way too big... You can google the size of bricks, and then work out how wide/high your texture is in real world units. Apply the UVW map to the model and set the sizes to match those of the real world size of your texture.. Your roof texture needs a bit of work; it looks very blurry which may be as simple as turning down the blur value of your bitmap... Default is 1 for some reason so you should change it to 0.1 in most cases... Your shadow areas are very dark; make sure you have the FG bounces set to at least 4 to get some light into these areas... The composition needs some work; change the camera angle to frame the whole house, and move the sun round in the oposite direction so it doesn't come from the same place as the camera.. I'd also probably go with a wider render; 16:9 type proportions as you have a lot of wasted space in the top of the image... Looking forward to seeing an update though; take all the advice on board from the forum and you'll improve in no time..

Without knowing much about your specs, it's obviously a lack of RAM that is letting you down... You really need to be on a 64 bit computer with at least 8GB Ram these days especially if you have hundreds of cars, trees, etc...

I know this is off topic, but how many times do people have to remind others not to write in CAPS on the internet, and also write full words, not txt spk. We're not children and it's nice to read correctly written type. Back on topic, Google Toms Hardware, and you can get full reviews/spec etc on all manner of hardware..

Claudio, maybe a little more insight into how you did this would be very useful... You've ended up with a very clean surface, and it would be great to know how you did it... Did you split your original circles in half, and then join them 1 by 1, then fill in the gap in the middle?

As far as I know, you can't just use the power of another computer; they all render frames out. Someone please correct me if I'm wrong... What's the problem with them rendering frames anyway? Once the machines are set up, they are ready to go, and you don't have to do much after the initial setup...

As Travis eludes to, I think you have to install Max on all of the machines, but they do not have to be licensed. What I would say is that once you install then, go in and set-up Max as per your main computer, i.e set up Gamma and LUT type setting etc, default material paths and such like.. Do this while you still have 30 days left in the trial, otherwise you won't be able to change them after that period... I did a render at some point, and after rendering lots of frames, I realised the Gamma was different on some of the machines.. Not good, so learn from my mistakes

I hate being at work; IT have started to block Flash videos for some reason... A Quicktime version would be worth a look at...

Dave, One thing I'd say is you'll get the best pictures either first thing in the morning, or later on in the evening to get more balanced light. Are you taking single shots, or combining lots of shots to make pano's?

Whats wrong with the Evermotion stuff? Archmodels Volume 18 has loads of kitchen stuff like plates, utensils, chopping boards, fruit bowls with fruit etc... http://www.evermotion.org/modelshop/show_products/3 They probably have newer ones than that, but it's a good start...

Not sure if this script has been posted before, but I've just discovered it.. It allows you to export 3D camera and dummy positions, as well as lights from 3DS Max to After Effects... There's even a little video to demonstrate the workflow... I've just tried it and it seems to work pretty well... http://ntashev.com/main.html Go to the TOOLS page and scroll to the bottom...

There is no such thing as typical render time I'm affraid.. There are hundreds of factors that affect the render time; number of poly's, light bounces, GI settings, materials, DOF and other effects, motion blur etc etc etc so no one will be able to give you any times.. The best way is to just have a go... Model a scene and render it on both machines... I think all you really need to know is that the more RAM you have, and better CPU, the faster you will render.. Spec the machine to your budget and go from there... People on here will tend to be quite helpful, but "give me a typical render time" is a too open ended to get a sepcific answer...

I'd say that adding those laptops to the render farm won't help that much unless you are producing quite simple scenes that don't require much RAM to render. We have a small farm in our office, but our new machines tend to render about 5 times quicker or more, and large scenes won't even render on the oldermachines. For reference, our older machines have 2GB RAM, and we still manage to crash them with large poly counts.. Setting up the farm isn't that difficult using Backburner, but as Dave mentioned, there are often things which stop the farm from working and it's often difficult to work out exactly what the problem is... Either way, have a go and see if they do help...

I'll wait until I get home; I can install a trial on my home computer for now...