Jump to content

Chris MacDonald

Members
  • Posts

    2045
  • Joined

  • Last visited

  • Days Won

    5

Chris MacDonald last won the day on January 29 2023

Chris MacDonald had the most liked content!

Personal Information

  • Country
    United Kingdom

Recent Profile Visitors

The recent visitors block is disabled and is not being shown to other users.

Chris MacDonald's Achievements

Newbie

Newbie (1/14)

  • Conversation Starter Rare
  • Collaborator Rare
  • Posting Machine Rare
  • First Post Rare
  • Week One Done Rare

Recent Badges

18

Reputation

  1. Yeah, it used to be a place where I could come and get answers within an hour or two because it was so busy. I think what's happened is that software has become more and more easy to use over the years, and rendering solutions tend to just work out-of-the-box thus negating the need for endless threads on "best irradiance map settings for animation", and so on. People these days tend towards the forums of their chosen product too. I do know however that there is still a wealth of talent and experience here - so I'll never leave purely because I may need to rely on that again one day.
  2. Hi James, Apologies for the delayed reply. Your reply was most helpful. I think one of the things we're struggling with at the moment is that our photogrammetry isn't of small/individual objects, it's of entire buildings/sites - so trying to get a decent topology/textures on this is proving onerous. Being new to ZBrush (still using the trial at the moment) it's feeling like an uphill battle; the navigation of the viewport is arguably the worst I've ever used in any 3D software - is there a way to change this? I don't suppose you've used ZBrush on a whole building/site?
  3. Hi all, I recently decided I'd dabble in some photogrammetry with our office drone and have been really quite surprised at the quality of the results I managed to achieve. The only downside is that the meshes that are generated are (as you might expect) incredibly uneconomical when it comes to triangles, and the texture atlases are wild - unusable if I wanted to edit them in say photoshop, for example. I'm currently using meshroom to create the models, but am not averse to buying something else if it allows us to produce better meshes and textures, so my first question would be what software would you recommend? Secondly, assuming the other software churns out fairly similar stuff, how would you suggest editing these meshes so they're a bit less unwieldy. I've tried the ProOptimizer modifier in 3ds max, but that seems to just hang forever without doing anything. I've also tried the new retopology tools in max, but again the same result; it just hangs. Any suggestions as to how to clean up the meshes, and bake the textures into a useable form would be much appreciated. Many thanks, Chris
  4. Couldn't disagree more. Sketchup is phenomenal.
  5. I'm an in house visualiser. I'm in the UK though. It's currently ludicrously busy and we've just interviewed another person to join my team today. Seems to be growing here. I know the other local practices (of a size that is large enough to warrant it) all have in house visualisers.
  6. That appears to be exactly the kind of thing I'm looking for - awesome, thanks!
  7. You're going to have to use very unrealistic F-stop values is all. Usually you might work in the range of f1.4 - f11, but you for the purposes of making a 1:1 model feel like a scale model you'll need to go down to f0.1 etc. Of course, this will mean you'll need to use a super fast shutter speed/very low ISO to compensate for the gain in exposure value.
  8. Hi all, Been a while since I've had to ask a 3DS max question, but I was wondering if any of you know of a plugin/script/piece of software that will automatically cut meshes based on an alpha map. I know Speedtree has a cutout generator, however purchasing speedtree for this one task is a bit like taking a sledgehammer to a walnut. I'm sure many of you are now familliar with stuff such as quixel megascans. I'm trying to find out if there's a way of automating the very laborious process of cutting around leaves to create individual leaf meshes in max. Any ideas welcome.
  9. I assumed (perhaps wrongly) that the majority of people had private pensions set up to bolster their state pension? I had a meeting with my pension fund manager last week who seemed to think I was on track to have a decent retirement fund - so it's no something I worry about. The only thing that concerns me long term is keeping money flowing into that pension fund!
  10. That looks absolutely fantastic! Great job! How much camera tracking was involved?
  11. Just a small update on my situation. My team (except me, being the manager of the team) has been furloughed, so I'm now handling all 3D work. Due to the almost instantaneous (and personally, I think shortsighted) decision by many developers to put their projects on hold our workload has dropped off significantly enough to warrant putting large parts of the practice on furlough. Aside from concerns about the future of the economy/my job, I've been enjoying working from home... Around 9 months ago I switched to a laptop workstation, which instantly highlighted the fact that for me to work from home I needed to sync our 3D models/texture assets from our server instead of trying to pull tens of gigabytes over my crappy internet connection. I've used Windows Sync Centre to achieve this and aside from one random hiccup where a lot of tiles were duplicated, it's been working fine for months. That said; it is only me using it and I can imagine if a whole team were, it'd be a bit of a nightmare. I've been enjoying my more creative freedom when working on images! I hadn't realised just how often people come to my desk and look at a half finished image (which then scares them) and begin making changes. I've been sending images out with much more interesting lighting, shading, post production, etc than I normally would and people are loving it! My home setup has always been quite a robust one; because I produce music in my spare time - so I've got a full office setup ready to go, whereas many of my colleagues are struggling to work from their kitchen tables. I've done more DIY and gardening than ever before, I'm not getting stuck in rush hour traffic every day, I'm working hours that suit me, I'm spending LOADS more time with my wife and dog. Aside from missing socialising with my family and friends, and going to pubs... I am actually really enjoying everything. Once normality is restored I may ask my employer if I can work a day or two a week from home as it's been so successful.
  12. I've had/am just getting over CV19 (though unconfirmed, as the UK isn't testing anything but the most severe cases) and it's pretty damn miserable, and I had it mild compared to most! I've seen our workload in the short term increase a little, but long term it's looking quite uncertain. I'm part of an architectural practice and we've already seen a couple of very large projects go on hold until things calm down a little. How are you guys in America coping with/finding Trumps way of dealing with this?
  13. Every once in a while I have a bit of a panic about this, but then I have a think back to when Sketchup/piranesi/etc came out and the remember same conversations were being had. I'm not concerned; as the others have said this is a topic that comes around every time a new technology comes around. I work in house at an architectural practice and Enscape has taken a lot of the iterative "what does it look like in this colour" work away and back into the hands of the architects. This has had the unusual effect of freeing up the team to take on bigger paying animation work which we would normally turn away because it took us away from being able to help out teams with those iterative tasks in-house. One thing that has become abundantly clear to me recently with regards to Enscape though is the difference in quality that can be achieved depending on who's behind the wheel. Just recently we had a couple of animations being produced within different teams within the office; which then ended up in the visualisation teams lap for various reasons. We turned these animations around and the difference between what we produced and what the architects/technicians were producing was absolutely worlds apart. Thankfully this was recognised by the architects involved and safe to say I don't think they'll be attempting to produce the final cut in their teams again. I don't think it's an architects place to be producing images when there is a visualisation team/company on hand to do that for them because from my point of view it demonstrates they've got too much time on their hands. There should be more than enough non-visualisation work in an architectural practice to keep architects busy designing buildings/liaising with clients & contractors/etc. This isn't me being protectionist either... We have a couple of young/newly qualified architects here who tend to do a lot of the visuals for their teams and I can't help but think that it's detrimental to their own careers; the more time they're creating images the less they're learning/doing actual architecture. Just my two cents.
  14. Hi, It depends what your budget is really? 3DS Max is something that (despite its flaws) is industry standard; so you'll be able to buy assets to use and drop them into your scene with very few changes plus there is a wealth of information & support out there to help you. If you were looking to perhaps get something cheaper then Modo would be worth looking at, or even Blender which is free - although purchasing/converting assets for these will be more tricky. Also do not underestimate the power of Sketchup; the speed and ease of use are still unbeatable for arch-vis, especially early stage conceptual stuff. If I were to go freelance today I'd personally opt for Sketchup, 3DS Max & Corona Render with the Adobe suite if my budget could stretch or Affinity Photo if not.
×
×
  • Create New...