JamesTaylor

what do you mean by direct/remote image linking? if its what i think i imagine any web space will do. if your planning on simply using it to host images and link them into a thread for example it would just be a case of setting the appropriate URL to the file.

Thanks Guys!! Great information that i'm sure will be of use to many more people too!

arrh yes the image, bit of a school boy error there!! here it is...

Attached is a photo and the exif data that can be found under its right click > properties. the photo has been sent by a client for use as the backdrop to a montage. i should be able to use this exif data to match my vray camera to the settings that were used by the photographer... but i seem to be getting lost along the way!! is this exif data missing important parts or am i just not using it appropriately?? in vray we have film gate (mm) focal length(mm) and zoom factor yet i only have focal length in the exif data. the camera model is indicated so is the missing data something i can look up?? i've been down this route a few times trying to use the exif data but i've never found it useful... but i'm sure it should be!! can anyone shed some light on this for me or provide a run down of how the exif data should be used in vray?? thanks guys!

yeah, great images! only issue i can see is with the end of the wall units and the breakfast bench -the bit with 4 bottles on, i'm not exactly sure what is going there? is it part of the design?, is it a mapping / modeling error. after spending a little time looking at it i think it is part of the design... however it jumps out as being wrong to me in regards to the image, it look as if the perspective is off.

Limbus you are right that there are still costs involved with running a render farm such as power, admin, depreciation etc. but these costs are minor in comparision to having your workstation out of action during working hrs which is what danb4026 seems to be impling. I would also still feel that running a render farm for rendering your own projects is a tooled required to be operational and its usage should once again still be part the price quoted.

i think charging for rendering is the wrong way to go... i presume you have provided a price for producing the image, rendering is a part of that process and as such your quote should have already included the time you will have to put aside for it. you are always going to encounter problems trying to put a price on the value of cpu rendering, as already stated the speed of the machine, at what time of day is the machine rendering?? over night, well i would presume your not working then so its a pretty minor consequence to you as opposed to during the day when you need the machine available to be earning your hrs wage... can you be doing something else whilst the machine is rendering etc. are you out of the office? is it at a weekend?? i feel that machines for rendering are a tool a visualiser needs and therefore is a cost that needs to be absorbed in your quotes in much the same way a carpenter need a plain or a saw.

that sounds as if it sucks.... i presume your company has a website?? If so why not add an extra couple of pages to the services and portfolio section which includes every piece of work / service that the ad firm has completed with you or offers. You can claim 100% credit for the entire projects that have been completed and then just let the ad firm know you have updated your website to include additional services and projects.... wait for their call of displeasure and have a little chuckle to yourself!! it may be a cheaper alternative to a lawyer for getting your point across, and if not you may drum up some additional work that could be sub contracted out to one of their competitors!!

The common take on it in respect to printers is that text is fine in photoshop above 10pts - you can get away with 8pts but if go to 6pts you need to enbed the vector data. PDF is one way to achieve this, in my experience i usually output the final print file to an .eps which included vector data for the text (althought the text is no longer editable). This method is probably doing exactly what outputting to an pdf does i would guess and probably originates from times before PDF was so universal

The more stops you use the better end result you will get. Using 15 of 20 stops, if done well, should allow you to gain sharp shadows from the HDRI as opposed to just diffuse light. there is a higher range of info in a raw file, however i would describe a RAW file as being of Medium Dynamic Range

Phil, i asked pretty much the same question not too long since - here's the thread http://www.cgarchitect.com/vb/28759-accuracy-viz-max-sun-system.html edit** of course i was only interested in the shadow positions etc. not sure if you are questioning the accuracy of the light levels received or irridance values at a given point when using the sun sky system?

i'll second that!

Hi Guys, looks as if i've got this figured now, just been waiting for the sequences to come back from the farm, but thanks for the interest. FYI the 2nd bounces were DMC and originally the nth frame was set at 5 It appears that my problem was coming from having a slightly too low HSph value that when just calculated for the single frame was able to be smoothed out by the interp value, however that slightly messy irr map was becoming increasingly messy when compiled with the others from every 5th frame and so exagerating the problem. Increasing my HSph value and drastically reducing the no. of Nth frames to be calced has solved the issue.

I know it won't be of use now but... the obvious answer here is to save a copy of the geometry to a unique file before creating proxy, you can always go back and amend then re proxy that way!! sorry i know that isn't really helpful now!

Here are 2 frames of the same scene. It is the very 1st frame of an animated sequence. I have been test rendering the scene as still images, with the irridance map set to single frame, and was happy with the image quality so sent the sequence to render precalculating the Irridance map using Multiframe Incremental, all other settings - Hsph SubDivs / Interp Samples etc. didn't change. As you can see from the 2 frames the resulting image quality differs quite drastically. The image rendered as a still is reasonably smooth (shadow areas) yet the same frame rendered via the Precalulated Irridance Map is very splothy in the shadow areas?? I would have expected the frames to come out the same irrelevent of which method was used? Can anyone explain?? Why the difference?