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derijones

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  1. Cheers May well venture down from the hills - I'll keep an eye on here
  2. Hi I've been using Maya/Maxwell a bit for some pretty basic house images (just using sunlight, no fancy lights or interiors) and sort of muddled the following together: I tend to do all of my modelling maya - don't use instances, or use the script that converts instances to geometry prior to exporting. get the UV's right with simple maya materials to get feedback on positioning of textures - each different material has a maya version, so it's easy to remap with the Maxwell material when it comes to it. I then create my materials using the maxwell material editor and create a MXM node for each different material and connect them to the relevant files. Swap the materials over from Maya types to Maxwell. I think the same goes for lights - model them and apply a MXM to them. Create a Maxwell camera node and position it. Use the "export scene" option under the Maxwell menu to fire out a .mxs for each camera location. Load these up in Studio, tweak the lighting settings, materials, sun etc (some of the options on environment don't seem to come through, or get corrupted). As long as you don't need to make modelling or UV changes, you shouldn't need to go back to Maya. Test Render and tweak....... Hope it helps Cheers Deri
  3. Have a look at Deep exploration - their CAD tools have a good poly reduction tool, not sure about price, but it's a handy bit of kit for viewing heaps of different files.
  4. IGES should be OK, but if not, I know in Rhino you can import a simple comma or tab deliminated file with the points in. Ive done this with hand drawn plans in the past - drawn in a 1m grid on it and then created a XYZ table in Excel to create the height map. Scan the plan in and use it as a background reference for drawing in the roads etc (or use it as a map overlay which can look Ok in a hurry!). Best of luck Deri
  5. Hi I use Rhino to create surfaces through point grids - the outer curves through points create the perimieter and the inner curves through points act as guide curves for the "create surface using guide curves" command. You can mesh this afterwards, but it seems to create the neatest terrain from a sparse set of points and also gives you control over the detail of your surface. No doubt you can do something similar in other packages. Cheers Deri
  6. Blimey, never seen Cardiff Bay looking like that! Nice work, what did you do the water with - is it done in photoshop? Only suggestion is that it looks a bit lonely - the green background hills give it a remoteness to me....... On another note - have you seen the high res images they've got in Google Earth for South Wales now - it's a bit worrying to be able to clearly identify cars and make out people. Did you do any of the stuff in the Western Mail add in on "Visions of Wales" a couple of weeks ago? Nadolig Llawen Deri
  7. Faster than a speeding bullet..... I've still not had a chance to try this out, as the local computer junk shop seems to have had a clear out and didn't have an old SCSI external case that would have been perfect to fit this and an old 60Gb HD I have lying about to allow me to put my MP's on the LAN. To be honest, if I was wanting to get a NAS now, I'd go straight for one of the off the shelf jobs you can get with gigabit ethernet etc, as they'd only work out a bit more than buying this card, an enclosure and Hard drive seperately. PS Jeff - the backup software seems to do exactly what I wanted, coupled with C Cleaner ( http://www.ccleaner.com/) and diskeeper 7 lite (http://tinyurl.com/6we8e), keeps the system safe and humming along sweetly. Cheers Deri
  8. View in IE doesn't work with FF1.5 so far - hope they sort that out quickly as it's very handy. the TinyURL extension also doesn't work or FireFTP. Adblock seems to be built in as EB said. Can't really see any great changes so far (maybe if you have 1Mb+ broadband it's faster, but I've only just got 512KB!), Firefox is just one of those programmes that you don't really notice, as it does what it advertises without fuss and histrionics, like all software should really:;
  9. Have you tried messing about with Deep Paint? I think it's free and it's interesting what you can do with it (always seems a bit trial and error though!) Attached is a job I did that went through DP:
  10. I'd think very carefully about setting up partnerships like that - if you've worked for someone and then move to being on an equal footing in the decision making process, it can lead to a lot of friction. Also check out the financial and goodwill standing of the company in great depth - seriously get an accountant to look at the figures - it's amazing what crap you can hide in an allowable set of accounts! This is talking from the experience of going from the CAD monkey in a two man band company, setting up the CAD/project management systems, then being offered a directorship as the company grew. I looked at the figures, thought I knew the business well and saw a bright future. The reality was that there was no real financial management going on, the company was only just breaking even and the jump from one man making all the direction decisions to a board of directors resulted in a hell of a lot of static and resentment. Working 60 hours a week and being last in line at the trough (you've got to pay the guys working for you first, to keep going!) isn't much fun. Sorry to be down on the idea, but I'd go for the profit sharing option - we make money, you get a bonus, we don't, you don't, but at least you still get your salary. If you trust your company's directors and there is a clear accounting setup (i.e not hiding car loans under "equipment" or trips to the Bahamas under "advertising"!), , there's an incentive to work hard all round. Cheers
  11. Phil there's a collection of 3 or 4 of them on Turbosquid for not too unreasonable a price.
  12. Hey Strat Speaking from the point of view of someone who went solo two years ago, sounds like you're doing the same sums. £250/day doesn't sound like much but to put in bluntly, it's a ba***rd to actually manage day in day out for year on end. I find work tends to come in waves - flat out busy for 3 months, then a hiatus while I run around shaking trees to see what falls out, then mad again. Even with working from the back office at home to minimise overheads, your still realistically talking about £10k/year - insurance, software, subs, new PC bits (it's amazing what you'll justify to yourself when you're bored at staring at the same wall (both physical and CG!) for days on end), travel, accountants fees, books, magazines etc etc...... Much as the WDA come across as being all bundles of cash, you'll have a bugger of a time getting any hard cash out of them - email me if you want more info on that front! You've got to be almost schitzophrenic in your attitudes - play the good boss/bad boss routine to ensure you get stuff done, but also don't freak out and fixate on the company. Best bit of advice I had recently was "go on holiday for 10 days and forget about the company - remember why you're doing this!" If you'd be happy making £20-30K /year with relatively low levels of stress and maximum amounts of interesting work, go for it, but to make the sort of money you're talking about realistically, I reckon you're looking at taking on staff, with all the hassle and crap that involves - you get to the point where you're no longer doing any arch viz work, just chasing customers, dealing with the bank and schmoozing for new work. I went from being paid peanuts, managing a company that was going down the drain; but couldn't give up the living in the countryside (I've just been standing outside, watching shooting stars and the Milky Way, with not another human light to be seen, freezing!). Cardiff's a good place to be based and as the housing market eases off, hopefully the developer's will be willing to stump up a bit more cash for work, but it's a bit of a gamble to take. Anyway, cheers for starting a thread that's cheered me up - at least I know I'm not the only CG'er in the village! Cheers Deri (This post was brought to you from the village of Llandewi Brefi....)
  13. Hi Have you downloaded the most recent driver software off the 3Dconnexion website - they seem to update it pretty regularly (latest version is 2.4.4 released on 16/11/05). I use it with Maya and suffer the same slow down - the last 2.4.3 upgrade seemed to make a bit of difference, but it's definitely not as fast as hitting the ALT key. Don't know of any NVIDIA settings that will help though, sorry!
  14. Cards turned up, no bother to install or setup - BUT, it only supports one ATA hard drive, rather than the two I thought, so not exactly what I needed. Serves me right for trying to be a cheapskate!
  15. Jeff I think (hope!) it screws in to the back side of a hard drive enclosure and allows you to use it as a USB enclosure for the local PC, but as a NAS for others - it looks similar to the Firewire bridge board that's currently in my HD enclosure. It allows you to connect two IDE HD's and have them as network drives, not sure about RAID or fancier stuff. At £30 I was willing to experiment - I'll report back once it arrives..... I'm guessing you could mount two or three of them in the back of an old PC box, have 4 or 6 hard drive's running off them as a cheap0.5 - 1.5TB NAS setup.
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