maxwood

You've got the basics down for sure, you'll learn a massive amount if you can get a job in a studio. If there's anywhere local I suggest you see if you can do a few weeks work for free. Unfortunately I think you'll struggle trying to persuade a studio in another country to take you on, they get emails like this all the time and it's a big risk when there are often plenty of other applicants in the same country. If anyone has had success with this though please do say. If you want to improve your technical skills (modelling, texturing, basic lighting, etc) I recommend Digital Tutors if you can afford it, I learnt more using that than I did at university. There aren't many secrets these days it's pretty easy get to a good standard by just following tutorials off a few blogs. http://www.ronenbekerman.com/ http://www.peterguthrie.net/blog/ http://bertrand-benoit.com/blog/chapter-four/ Skip Grant Warwick's VRay tutorials until you've got a bit more experience. They're awesome tutorials and Grant is a top guy but I think he fails to really clarify that his optimization techniques are more like if you're sending final renders and want perfect quality. I see too many people just whacking in obscene amounts of subdivs with brute force and waiting all night for a render when you can have something that looks almost identical in under half the time. /rantover Hope that was some help.

Unfortunately it probably isn't even worth the effort learning, I just can't see any games studios dropping Unity/UE to use this. Minimal use -> minimal support + updates -> canned. Why don't Autodesk just improve the support existing and more well equipped game engines?

I'm really keen to upgrade but I realistically can't risk upgrading my workstation. Might see if I can get it on my old PC and see what happens.

Decided to go with the Dell U2715H, picked it up this morning - looks great but not had chance to get stuck into it properly yet. Decided against 4k because of the support issues everyone was mentioning and I'm glad I did, the text/icons are small enough at 1440p!

I'm still debating this with myself. I did some quick research the other day and it seems that I'd be already looking at around £300 for a 27"+ 1440p IPS. It makes more sense to me to buy the 4k P2715Q now that you can get one for below £500 - rather than buying a 1440p now and a 4k in the next year or two. Cheaper in the long run?

Thanks for the thoughts guys. I'm already running a XL2420T at 120Hz so spending the extra money on another monitor with a high refresh rate just for gaming isn't really worth it. The 21:9 monitors you mentioned sound cool but I'll wait for the reviews and inevitable issues with their window tiling apps, probably more than I want to spend anyway. I'll have a look around for 27" IPS 1440p monitors and see how the refresh rate adds to the price. Cheers!

Hey all, I'm looking at getting the Dell P2715Q, it's a 4k, 60hz, IPS panel. Just wondering if anyone else is running this particular monitor or if you're running in 4k? Is it worth it at this point? I'm in the market for a new IPS monitor anyway so figured I might as well make the jump to 4k. What kinds of problems have you encountered? I've seen a few things about Windows scaling are there still a lot of issues with programs not supporting this? I'm still running Max 2014 so I assume that will of course have some issues. Cheers!

I love Vancouver I've only been once and it's still one of my favourite places. Unfortunately I'm in the same boat even with the pound being much stronger than the Euro I'd still be looking at £2.5k as a single traveller for flights + conference. Really hope it gets funded though, it would be great for the industry as a whole.

When you're looking at high level work you're seeing the whole image as a finished piece of work and probably days of work from multiple artists. It's easy to be intimidated by that but if you break it down in to individual tasks then it's usually nowhere near as difficult as you might think. As for tutorials, I'm fairly sure there aren't any "elite" arch viz tutorials which go from start to finish but like I said - break it down. Find individual modelling, lighting, shading tutorials.

I'm kind of curious as to why no one is asking why this is in Canada? There seems to be very little chatter about the conference on the forum. I'd have liked to attend but it's just too expensive unfortunately.

The GGX setting is only available as of VRay 3.1, I don't believe that version has been released for Maya yet.

Hey guys, Yep, it's another workstation thread. Hoping I might be able to get some advice on some specs and hopefully Dimitris will chip in with his knowledge. I'm looking to build a new workstation, I was hoping for a few suggestions on a couple of peripherals. I'll be using 3DS Max and VRay mainly, perhaps a little gaming at some point but that's not a priority. Renders around 4k in size and I also want to start experimenting more with GPU Rendering. My budget is ideally £1500-£2000. 1. CPU - I'd be looking for at least 16 threads. I'm currently looking at Intel Core i7-5960X 3.0GHz 8-Core Processor 2. Graphics Card - I've used the quadro cards at work quite a lot but they never felt particularly quick, hard to know without testing the same scenes on another card but ideally I'd rather not buy one of these. So for both heavier scenes and some GPU rendering I'm currently looking at either the following - a. GeForce GTX Titan Black b. 1 x Gigabyte GeForce GTX 780 Ti 3GB WINDFORCE c. 2 x Gigabyte GeForce GTX 780 Ti 3GB WINDFORCE d. GeForce GTX 980 e. GeForce GTX 970 f. I have no idea?! 3. RAM - Assuming more is obviously better, what's the best type of RAM to get? How much of an impact does the Mhz have on RAM? I'll be aiming for preferably 32gb of ram. Currently looking at G.Skill Ripjaws Series 32GB (4 x 8GB) DDR4-2400 Memory 4. Motherboard - How do you find one of these suckers that supports the CPU I decide on? I'm currently looking at ASRock X99 Extreme4 ATX LGA2011-3 Motherboard 5. Power supply - What's necessary for this kind of machine? Here's a PC Partpicker config I threw together - not sure about some of the parts here.. http://uk.pcpartpicker.com/p/8tRtkL If someone could throw together a revised PC Partpicker config - I'd really appreciate that Quite a few questions there, but really appreciate the help. Thanks, Max

I believe there's monitor calibration software built in to windows. Have a look in control panel. It means you'll have to do it by eye though. I use a Spider Elite which comes with its own monitor calibration software.