GeordieJames

No problem, how long is each frame taking ? And whilst I am a Mac afficianado don't forget you can use PCs as render nodes just as easily as Macs so if there are of those knocking about on your local network then it can be a very cost effective way to work.

Hi Joe, Do you have access to other local computers (Mac or PC) ? If so, even without internet access you could create your own renderfarm and distribute the frames that way. If you haven't done this before its very straightforward to set up. All the best James

Hi Brian, what Mac OS are you using ? James

Steve I'm with Alex on this, you shouldn't be afraid to allow such dynamism within your imagery. I've fought long and hard trying to get that perfect balance and in the end, when achieved, it just looks overly good...which makes it seem fake. Its a bit like HDR imagery - sometimes it's so well exposed everywhere that it just looks odd. Whilst I don't think I've quite achieved it yet I'm always looking to create imagery that has the feel of a professional photographer and its amazing how often they push areas within an image to accentuate others. But of course 'the customer is always right' so if you have to reduce it then the customise features should enable you to do that. Cheers James

Guy Superb...inspirational...thankyou

how cool is this :-) Thx for posting Tomas

secret 64 bit version....we have Psunami somewhere but hadn't even thought to see whether it was 64bit....we did one job with it way back when and it was brilliant but slow, love to see how quick it is now with 9 :-) I'm off digging for it

Hi Rod I upgraded to FZ7 a while back and instantly found issues with the fact export. Its been reported and they will be updating it in the next bug fix release....which is taking an age to come out probably because they have a lot of work to fix their component system which is very buggy (found that out some time into a complex nested project !!!). As Tomas says for now you can force the export to work correctly by checking the 'triangulate all facetted' option. I do get differing export results from FZ6.5 to FZ7 so I have both versions running just in case. Cheers James

Fantastic work Ash, beautifully lit. You say unwrapping the UV's was a nightmare...dare I ask how you did it ? James

fantastic news :-)

Once again Cristobal's work inspires - damn he's good :-)

Hey Mondoman - good call on the bexier 2 deformation - I've managed to almost replicate the curve (probably good enough for my purposes) using the tail split in two and each one having a bezier 2 deformation....now to animate it :-)

Hi all, Looking for some basic help with rigging a tail - its part of a logo and I'm deconstructing the logo to animate it back into its final state. The pic attached shows the position it needs to finish in and it shows my initial attempts to rig it. I know I could animate the bones individually but as I understand this is what IK is for so I want to try and work it out properly. Steps so far ; 1. I created a straight mesh with the right thicknesses for the final logo - segmented enough to bend properly 2. Created bones along its length now, here's what I 'wanted' to do, from this point set IK handles and bend and twist the tail from the straight position to the final curved position....and then animate it my best success has been however to rotate the bones till the skinned shape matches the logo (what you see in the pic attached) and then attach IK handles But of course with little understanding I can't bend it as I want to and it flips and does all sorts of crazy stuff. So this is an initial shout out for some help working out the best way of animating this tail, and of course if probably a pre-cursor to me finally buying your rigging DVD's Alonso (this is the first project I've needed to do this...honest) Look forward to comments/suggestions Cheers James

Great comparison data for operating systems - and EI9 is just sooooo quick - Sponza in 8 seconds on my PC Slave - see uploaded results for details

Well, in the interests of humanity I've taken the plunge...its not going great facially, Ned Flanders being my closest looky liky Anyhoo, if anyone would like a laugh it shall be growing here :-) http://uk.movember.com/mospace/5496557

Hi there Meester Smeeth James from Persona-id here, heavy users of EI - what can I do you for ? James

Don't be embarrassed, it sounds like a well worked scam - well done for getting to the bottom of it without the flight to China ! It doesn't detract from the time and effort you obviously put into trying to set the deal up though - business is tough enough without such distractions. I look forward to reading about it in the magazine - which one by the way James

Hi Nutley, just watched your transformers video - very cool :-) As the above post says the only way is to use a parent effector and ensure that the children have 'inherit scale'. I, like you have had to import a model and scale it 'en masse' to fit another project. Barring my issue related to hard wiring the master materials into such a model it works fine. Cheers James

Very cool

woh, that should come with an adults only warning - great model Alonzo, who was your model inspiration :-) James

What can you say - superb ! Great creativity and an enormous amount of work. And what an ad for EIAS 8 - you're an inspiration Diego. James

For what its worth we're just trying to work out the whole 'best case backup system' ourselves. What we're thinking of is a 2TB eSATA 3 7200 disk running off an old G4 as a server with an external caddy holding 2 2TB eSATA 5400 disks. The 7200 spin disk will be used as the 'online' storage for myself and my business partner with the other two disks providing the back up and archive (swapping them out when they are full) Does that sound sensible ? James

I was in the depths of a theme park over the weekend with no wifi so I've just had a proper chance to tour the new site brilliant - in a nutshell ! Well done to Tomas, Igors and the wider team James

very well done - that happened to me in reality not so long ago !

Hi Juanxer It does as it happens, I have the Heliodon in there that uses Xpressionist - is that a problem you've found ? James Juanxer Just deleted Xpressionist out the file and it runs perfectly !! Fantastic....although I can't have my nicely positioned sun animated over time :-( Do you know if I can export the values that Xpressionist generates and then re-import them as animation data without Xpressionist being active ? If you can a simple step by step to ease my weary brain would be appreciated. Thanks again though - it gets me going again. Tomas - is this a known bug ?? James