Rebelismo

Because they don't want you to do that . I'm not sure if there is a reason to own a Mac any more unless maybe for development purposes? At this point, I don't see how they could offer a better solution than what's currently available to everyone in the market. I used to own a few devices from them, but they let everything stagnate and doubled down on OpenCL. The only way I would ever consider their machines again is if they offered something truly revolutionary. Not 5% thinner "revolutionary", but lets say something that would turn the world of rendering on it's head. I just don't see the value proposition for their machines. Especially not for heavy 3d, VR, or general purpose work.

Yeah I don't have any issues with the point system at all. I'll definitely subscribe for a while to see how it works with the Suite. The only thing that surprised me is that the $29 subscription for a freelancer becomes $6,960 up front for a studio. The same $79 4K freelancer pack becomes $2,099 for a studio. Their Indie subscription doesn't make sense to me as it's up to 10 artists but with less than $100,000 in revenue per year. They seem to be quite open to feedback right now though so if you have any questions or concerns then definitely tell them.

Apologies if this has been posted already, but it seems that Megascans is finally out. https://megascans.se/ It looks like the freelancer subscription is about 30 dollars a month for 50 points. Each asset has a points value, and I believe you can reload your points if you run out. I'm going to have to give it a go this month. On the other hand if you have a studio that brings in beyond $100k in revenue, you're looking at either $580 per month or you can get packs that start at about $2000. Looking at it from that perspective, things can get very expensive, very quickly.

I wouldn't personally overclock cards for rendering as I've seen overclocked cards burn out and die. I can't wait til the CUDA 8.0 toolkit is released, and we see some true rendering benchmarks. I believe that you might be right about the 1070 being the best value for the money though.

I usually advocate for beefy cards, but I expected more than a 30% increase in performance over the 1080 and 16GB of RAM at this price tag. Is the 1080Ti going to happen at all now? It seems that there isn't a lot of wiggle room left for a Ti model. On the other hand, this new Titan X makes a good case for just getting two 1070s or 1080s.

$650 for a 1070 sounds extremely harsh. Where are you located and why are the prices that much higher?

Yeah that's very exciting technology. I think the Razer one is pretty expensive though at about $500. I believe ASUS is working on their ROG XG2 enclosure as well. I'd be more open to them if the cost was at about $250. Anything more, I can just remote connect from my laptop into my desktop :).

If you were to grab the Fireball off of the Pyro_FX shelf the workflow would be as follows: 1) attach RS obj parameter to pyro_import. Under Redshift OBJ, check Volume Enable and select Volume primitive. 2)Use a RS Volume shader with properly named channels Essentially no need to use OpenVDB unless you want to. I would definitely try to get your hands on the 2.0.47 demo to see how it handles some of your animations. As for FumeFx and all these other plugins...that's one of the reasons why I wanted to try out Houdini. FumeFx, RealFlow, Krakatoa, etc. All of these will add up to a lot in maintenance fees.

I understand the hesitation when it comes to cost. I bought Octane Standalone + Octane for Houdini Indie right before the price jump, and then debated getting it for Maya as well. Ultimately, I'd like to put more time into Houdini in the future so I decided against it. I've been using RS and Octane with Houdini Indie for some time now, as the developer of the Octane plugin is also the developer of the Redshift plugin for Houdini. The current version is definitely a work in progress but plenty of features are already there: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1Tdh7MyeebbgVuy7Xktf01G2i1pAnShmXWnfGAnHeU4E/edit RS4Houdini does support Houdini volume primitives and you can see it in my extremely basic test, so no need for OpenVDB if you don't want to use it. Few seconds per frame on progressive mode. If you can, download the demo to see if Redshift would fit your needs because that's the best way to make a decision. What type of rendering do you do? Is it mostly product rendering, or animations?

I'm perfectly fine with their maintenance policy, and I own both Redshift and Octane. RS support is the best I've ever encountered when it comes to bug fixing and feature requests, so comparing them to Autodesk doesn't make sense to me. I can use my single license of Redshift across multiple DCCs without having to pay for each individual plugin like I would with Octane. There's also the possibility of running multiple jobs on one machine with multiple gpus. Most engines nowadays support physically based rendering (energy conservation). Biased rendering on the gpu allows for a faster clean up. Imagine single and multi scatter subsurfaces, volumetric rendering, global illumination, depth of field, motion blur and combine this with millions/billions of polygons. All of those processes are quite intensive to render so studios/freelancers tend to look for ways to make heavy projects feasible. This is why de-noising software is getting more popular. Complexity always increases, and noisy renders are a problem.

Some very nice improvements with 2.0. Really liking the new PBR Material, and OpenVDB support.

I've noticed that there is plenty of slow downs associated with this as Substance Painter is recording every stroke, so I'm personally not sold on this function 100%. I think I'd rather have the ability to work freely with 4k maps across multiple UDIMs. Every time I've done the 2k to 4k upres workflow, it was due to the fact that painting in 4k was not a smooth experience.

I've been working with Zbrush, 3dCoat, Maya and Houdini. Also tested out renderers like Octane, Redshift and Arnold. So far so good. Most mobile cards are definitely pricier than their desktop counterparts, and generally not as good (memory and speed). That's why I'm really considering the external GPU options for the future. At this point I also have a 3-GPU desktop workstation and can tell you that 2 cards are always better than 1, and 3 work better if the renderer scales well. Are there any models you wanted to test in 3dCoat in particular on a mobile set up?

I was able to get a Lenovo P70 recently with a 17 inch screen, Intel Xeon, Quadro M600M and 64GB RAM. The nice thing is that it also has pen input. I use it for all of my 2d, 3d, and compositing needs when I'm on the go. It's good to be able to use a stylus (wacom bamboo 2-in-1) with software like Zbrush and 3Dcoat, or even Photoshop, Manga and Paintstorm. The cool thing is that it also has thunderbolt 3 inputs in case I ever want to plug in an external gpu as the quadro is not that powerful. Having said that, the MSI does look like a nice machine :).

Although I haven't experienced too many full blown crashes, I have gotten plenty of problems where it just stops working. It is also quite slow when its building layers or masks. Honestly, I'm mostly waiting for them to release Megascans because those scanned materials are fantastic. Substance is pretty cool as well, because Allegorithmic listens to user input and they made their software inexpensive for indies. I found myself using all 3 major packages in tandem when working on projects. 3dCoat is def. the fastest when it comes to painting and it's still one of the best purchases I ever made. If you find part 2 of Adam, would you mind posting it here?