BrianKitts

Shouldn't make a difference. did you make the HDR yourself from the EXR? I would open up your HDR file in HDRshop and check to see that all your exposure levels are intact and that it didn't lose it's dynamic range in the conversion.

Really well done! It's nice to see an exploration outside the normal CG holiday card ideas. great stuff from squint as always! bk

Sooooo.......michael buble? can't image what it costs to purchase the legal writes to embed and distribute that with your holiday card.

depends on how good your portfolio is.

turn off any reflectivity, and drop a falloff map in your diffuse map. then duplicate your current map in both slots, set the color swatches to white and then turn down the bottom maps percentage to 50 or so that way as it falls off to glancing angles it desaturates and goes white. Will give your fabric a realistic sheen.

Think you may have your terminology a bit mixed as many use outsourcing for a renderfarm, as most don't have the inhouse capability for processing heavy data loads specifically for animations. However I'm assuming what you're asking about is outsourcing visualization work, typically a touchy subject in the industry. Answers to your questions: 1. Scale-able labor, there when you need it....not charged when you don't. 2. Language Barriers. If you find a company that has people on staff for translation you may have an easier time communicating but then you have a higher price tag as sometimes those companies will have to pass information between multiple people to make a simple change which slows the process. As for the geography, it depends on if you're talking about outsourcing overseas versus domestic. Domestic is easier to communicate with at a higher pricetag. 3. This question would be geared more towards arch firms as we ourselves are a rendering production studio. 4. Depends on how indecisive the designers are! Too many variables to answer this question 5. Same as answer 4 6. Design review/approval, and marketing. 7. 50/50 split 8. Both 9. Typically multitask rendering and modeling simultaneously anyone who waits is wasting time. 10. As soon as the client signs the contract!

yes you could, shouldn't cause any problems. but oddly you may find that if you calc with DOF on, your irradiance pass will be faster! It's very scene dependent, in the global setting turn off the render image, and test a region of your image with DOF on and off to check the calc time variance. Think of it this way.... if DOF is blurring and smoothing your image, it's less detail for the image sampler to crunch on so it calcs through it faster. where as in a sharp scene every detail is shown and the image sampler will be less adaptive crunching every little detail thus longer calc times.

oops sorry just double checked this so I didn't lead anyone astray..... CS6 supports OpenEXR files, but not layered EXRs, still going to need the plugin. http://fnordware.blogspot.com/2012/04/proexr-ez-is-free.html you should have CS6 though..... 4 words, adaptive wide angle correction!

What's up hammer! hope things are going well back in cowtown.

That's only if you're writting your EXR our through the save image file option. When you're using the output to vrimg slot set to EXR like Marty is all channels get included. It sounds like you're getting your channels embedded properly if your file is getting larger. Make sure you have the ProEXR.8Bi file in... C:\Program Files\Adobe\Adobe Photoshop CS6 (64 Bit)\Plug-ins and make sure if you've got it in the 64bit version of PS programs files that you are running the 64bit version of PS (or 32bit if you're behind the times) Is there a specific reason you are writing our through the vrimg output slot? best option is use the max buffer write out to exr and put it on auto or select the g-buffers to include (can't use the vray buffer to get all the channels packed in an exr) then you'll know you've got that variable out of your problem. (also knock it down to a 16bit float save yourself some file space / decrease load times when running exr sequences with embedded channels through aftereffects for compositing your animations)

if you don't have CS6, you will need the openEXR plugin for photoshop, which you mentioned before if that's not working you must not have it installed properly. Hold the alt(option) key when you open you're EXR do you get an OpenEXR options menu?

just type in .exr to your file name, it will work. update your vray to the current version and you will see a check box for saving as an EXR.

This has nothing to do with export or render settings, it's actually the camera setup and lack of motion blur. Export a still from any video camera moving sequence during a turn and you will see that everything gets blurred. (test it even with a camera phone for video) Turn motion blur on, although it will blur a still frame when looked at as a moving animation all will look smooth, and when you aren't moving fast everything will be crisp. Look up shooting video with a DSLR and you'll find that most shoot video with a shutter speed around 1/40th of a second. So first task is making sure that your physical camera settings are real world scenario or close. I actually find that to be a bit too much so I stray more towards 1/60th. Use the ISO to balance out your lighting levels, or Fstop if you aren't baking in DOF. (hint want to look more real....all cameras shoot with DOF shouldn't you?) to get a smooth animation with no motion blur turned on, you would need to render at an excessively high frame rate, not worth the rendertime. As a crutch you could throw your final product through aftereffects, and use the timewarp effect with motion set to 100 and enable motionblur. It does a pretty good job reading your before and after frames to measure pixel motion and give a pretty realistic post production motion blur. all these kill your render time so make sure you have optimized as much as you can with materials and lighting but the fact is that if you want it to look right, you've got to do it right.

and don't use groups they are lazy organization systems that make it hard to work in the scene when groups are nested and they don't function well with layers. Learn to model properly (only boolean when necessary...hint it normally isn't) and organize your scene well using proper naming conventions, attaching objects, and proper layering for organization

You'll need to post what settings you are using to get an answer of what to correct.