Scott Dombrowski

For most of the pandemic, we've been fully remote with our workstations at home. We have a VPN connection back to the office to access our network drives and the download speeds aren't too bad. We're stuck with Comcast for home internet, so the best upload I can get is 35Mbps. We're just now starting to transition back to the office (thought it's been pushed back a couple of times), so we need to be able to support a hybrid work schedule with some days at home, some in the office. A laptop would be the simplest solution, but we'd be sacrificing quite a bit of performance. So what we've settled on for now is to keep our workstations in the office and remote in using Teradici PCoIP software. I did some limited testing and it seemed to work ok. No appreciable lag that was present when using RDP. Video editing worked fine, and it even allowed the use of Sketchup and Enscape remotely which was not possible with RDP. We hope to deploy in the next few weeks and then I'll be able to really put it through its paces. I think our IT guy said it was $200/yr per license, but it had a 5 license minimum, so it isn't ideal for just one or two people.

We're looking to move to laptops to support a hybrid work schedule (part time at home, part time in the office). We have a render farm in-house, so it won't be necessary to stuff as many cores as possible into the laptop, but I am looking for a fast single core speed and a sufficient video card. I've heard some anecdotal grumblings about Alienware's reliability, but that was a few years ago so I don't know if that's still the case or not. Anyways, the XPS 17 checked off most of my boxes, and it looks like you can configure one with an 11th gen i7, 64GB of RAM, and a 3060 video card and be within your budget. The maxed out i9 is just a bit over your budget, but not by much. I wish the video card was better, but the laptop does have Thunderbolt 4 ports so I think we can use an eGPU if we really need to.

I'm not sure about Hum3D, but many branded models on TurboSquid are licensed for editorial use only. In their search options, you can specify the license type so that you get unbranded vehicles. It certainly cuts down on the number of models to choose from.

Try using the Rest Xform tool. Forest Pack is picky about... something in that regard (I'm not sure what) that a Reset Xform seems to sometimes fix.

That's hilarious. My home office is a small room with that you have to walk through in order to get to the first floor bathroom, which is a few feet away from my desk. I was on a conference call and didn't notice my 10 year old sneak into the bathroom, which he then very loudly used. It must have the beans we had for lunch. I had my headphones on for the call and just vaguely registered that there was other noise in the room while I was talking. I only realized that everyone on the call was treated to delightful bathroom background music after he flushed and walked out, at which point I had a bit of embarrassed explaining to do. Luckily it was just some co-workers on the call and not my boss or any clients. After that, I worked with management to implement some bathroom policy changes.

I'm at an A/E firm where a majority of our work is city/state/federal government work. I don't have visibility to all of the projects the company has going on, but none of the projects I'm involved with have slowed down (yet). My team took their computers home and we're working remotely. Others in the firm are using remote desktop to work from home. My team tried that, but we were not able to get Sketchup or Enscape to work over a remote connection without jumping through a lot of hoops. The downside to working remotely is that we're having some bandwidth issues with the VPN. We've synced our 3D project files to our local computers and back everything up to the network at night, but getting updated Revit files and CADD files from the architects and engineers during the day can be slow. Other than that, it's been seamless. Beyond those bandwidth issues, working from home has been pretty great. I keep in touch with coworkers via Skype and text, and it's nice to see more of my family even if I'm tucked away in the home office most of the day. At least now they know that the rare occasions I'm working late on a project, I really am working late on a project and not gallivanting around town. I think they had doubts before.

My experiences have been mixed. Like others said, it takes longer to download the frames than actually render them. A few times one of their machines would get stuck on a frame and it would be a back and forth with them to get the one frame to render and I'd eventually get a refund. The thing that was the biggest pain for me was it took a lot of time to prep the scene for their system. They did not support the latest versions of the iToo plugins until they'd been out for a while, which I sort of understand, but I'd have to install older versions in order to get their checker to accept the render. They also didn't support Civil View traffic, which really ground my gears because it's a built-in part of Max, not a special plugin. So I'd have to spend a bunch of extra time baking all that stuff out too. I still saved time in the end compared to trying to render on my own small farm, but it took a lot more effort than just giving them money and hitting the render button. We've since moved on to using Unreal for animations which has been a complete game changer with regard to iterative changes and negligible render times.

Yeah, sounds like a MAC address conflict. In backburner.xml (c:\users\XXXX\AppData\Local\backburner\backburner.xml) add as a sub-line to and it'll get populated with the correct MAC address of the local machine. https://area.autodesk.com/blogs/max-station/n37_at_any_given_time_only_one_of_your_backburner_servers_can_connect_to_the_backburner_manager/

Thanks for the heads up Francisco. To swing this back to the topic, we moved away from Quadros a couple of lease cycles ago when we went with 980ti cards. Worked great with Max / VR and was a lot more cost effective.

Has anyone tried a desktop video card in an eGPU chassis connected via Thunderbolt 3? We have a bunch of laptops in our loaner pool that are generally spec'ed to be VR capable other than the video card and it'd be nice to be able to just buy the video card & enclosure instead of a whole new laptop.

We've had just two dedicated nodes in-house for years. They help crank out still renders either via DR or Backburner. We only do a couple of animations per year, and our workflow is switching over to realtime for that. The render nodes help on those by handling the light bakes. I used Rebus a few times in the past and the process seemed pretty finicky. I had to bake all the Civil View traffic because their plugin checker didn't recognize Civil View, despite it being built-in to Max. Getting the scene ready for Rebus took more time than anticipated, and downloading frames afterwards took a lot longer than anticipated. Overall, it was still a lot faster than rendering 6000 frames in-house. Our clients are perfectly happy with game engine quality animations and we like not having to set aside as much time for output as we would with traditional rendering. Plus, we get a VR capable scene out of it as a bonus. tl;dr: Small in-house farm for us.

I remember having this problem a few years ago. Check the MAC address in the line in C:\Users\xxx\AppData\Local\Backburner\backburner.xml It should be unique for each node, but if you've cloned your configuration to several nodes it might be the same one each one. Further detail here: https://area.autodesk.com/blogs/max-station/n37_at_any_given_time_only_one_of_your_backburner_servers_can_connect_to_the_backburner_manager/

Just an update on this. We never did figure out the VISSIM workflow. I ended up purchasing Craft Director Studio which worked great. As a bonus, it accurately handled the trailer wheels going up on the truck apron of the roundabout, which I don't think VISSIM / Civil View do on their own. Once you rig your high-poly truck model, you can either drive it manually (keyboard, steering wheel controller, joystick, etc.) or have it go in "autonomous mode" where it follows a path or another object. I just linked it to the VISSIM HGV box and it worked great. I'll see if I can get a video up once it goes public.

That's what I figured. I've pointed him towards this thread, so hopefully that image will help. I'm out of the office for a couple of weeks, so I'll check back in then. Thanks again for your help!

Ok, I've gotten a couple of .fzp files that are supposed to have the cabs in one file and trailers in another, but when I import both files the boxes that Civil View creates are on top of each other. Is your traffic guy in today?