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1

Jobs / Freelance 3ds Max archviz specialist looking for all sorts of 3D work

« on: 2022-03-08, 08:57:51 »

A 3d artist with 15 years of freelance experience, based in Finland. Looking for all sorts of projects, but especially used to archviz (no animation, though).

You can find some (dated) work over at https://www.behance.net/villekiuru
and feel free to ask any and all questions! My contact info can be found on my Behance site.

I'd appreciate all job offers, and am ready to start new work right away!

Best regards,
Ville Kiuru

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General CG Discussion / Is everyone content with the Megascans subscription model(s)?

« on: 2018-12-13, 14:23:35 »

First off, they offer great scans and atlases. The price is not high, it's just that it's not every month that they release stuff that's useful to me.

So if I get billed monthly and one day decide to stop for a bit because they're going in a direction that offers little or no concent that is useful to my region and I'll have to wait a month or two until they're "back on track" from my prespective, the credits that I have left on my account cannot be used until I pay to get my account active again. Also the Bridge becomes inactive if I take a month off. Am I out of my way thinking it's morally a bit off, even if I consider their pricing model to be fair otherwise?

I mean, if I've already paid 139 dollars I should at least be able to rest assured that my money is there to be turned into assets whenever I want to? Their current model is kind of like a bank freezing your account if you refuse to deposit another $139 in the turn of the next month, which I'm unwilling to do because I've already paid and am waiting for the right kind of material to pop up, and for the last x number of weeks they've been dropping off stuff that is of no value to me.

Also I can understand the Mixer being something you need to pay monthly to get access to because it's a tool and an awesome one at that but the Bridge? It's an export process, making it unusable/manual labor for your existing models, atlases & textures if you decide to  take some time off since there's nothing useful among the new stuff feels almost like extortion (I know - too harsh a word but can't think of a better one at this moment).. I mean it's an export option for assets I already have, not like I'm investing in something I haven't paid for.

I know they have their own support but I'd like to hear opinions from others - am I seeing this all wrong or asking too much for the price?

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Off-Topic / Any market for HQ, (RAW) photoscanned models? *Image heavy OP* :)

« on: 2018-07-18, 19:18:04 »

Let's get the "raw" part out of the way. No it doesn't refer to any kind of *raw* material you could make a funny pun of :)

What I mean by raw is, I'm not a ZBrush owner/user. I've had use for all kind of detailed foreground models but never enough time or need to actually go through the props and clean them up to nice quads and unwraps. If I've needed to do de-lighting on a model I've done some postwork in Photoshop. The scans have been effective where I've needed them - detailed and easy to use in order to mask/cover up large monotonous areas near the camera or just plain offer higly detailed tree trunks for fir trees, pines, birch etc species we have in the northern Europe and have them react to lighting.

I've used a Nikon D800 (to be fair about 5% of the scans are done with an earlier Nikon D700 I had) to capture all sorts of elements like corners of buildings, streetside curbs and of course the tree trunks that are propably the most photo-scanned element along with rocks :)  The 36,3 megapixels combined with a high quality 35mm Sigma lens have led to results that I've been satisfied with. I know there are dozens of sites offering all sorts of scans nowadays but I've still been wondering if sorting models according to category would get any traction? My workstation isn't limited by RAM so I have no problem with the 5-15 million polygon models and 8-16k px textures (and if I do it's not that hard to optimize them anyway), and I know some people rather prefer the heavy unprocessed scans so they have full control in ZBrush or what ever their program of choice might be. But I know many people buy models for the efficiency so in the end, if the models themselves would be of interest if they were better optimized and the topology was cleaned up I guess given enough interest I might try and find a way to do that with some low cost alternative for processing. I'm a bit skeptical about it, I'd really need to sacrifice a great deal of time in order to get optimized and low poly models available.

So with this in mind, would really high poly models like these - gathered to packs according to category or sold as separate pieces - gain any interest? I wouldn't want to stomp the prices or anything but if sold as they are the price couldn't be too high, being unoptimized and all. At the same time it wouldn't be worth while selling models that have taken time and money to process, and get a total of ~10-20 purchases for a pack of, say, 5 models with 20€ each. So - I'd appreciate your thoughts a great deal.

At the moment while not necessary on a "vacation" I've toned down my daily schedule significantly because I was overburdened for way too many years for reasons that weren't always up to me. Because of this I'm interested in any sort of income, even though I'm already back doing archviz things like I loved doing them, feeling way better than I was some three to five months ago. So regarding present and future scans.. I'm not at all sure if I'm making any more for personal use since I don't need anything particular at the moment and the licence fees are high (and gone up), if there'd be enough commercial interest I'd be happy to gather up more assets based on requests. I know tree trunks and rocks aren't in huge demand but I got to start with / make a preview out of something :)

So if you've interested, please scroll down for some screenshots! :) Some are in more detail or clay version to give a general feel and then just a bunch of random items :) If nothing else, I'd be happy to hear and any feedback or ideas! Like, should I keep on doing this or is there enough instances offering stuff out there? Would you buy scanned high res stuff that you yourself would further improve and optimize or is it exactly the kind of thing you want to pay for to save time? Don't get me wrong, I know this would be the majority of potential customer base but it's a relevant question still.

Anyway.















These are kind of the same but worked real well as foreground elements, camera set near ground:







Some street / concrete stuff:







Got a few models of this type. Not very aestethical so I really don't know why.









Pavements :)









More suff!









... tried scanning equipment from local parks but the metal parts are a pain and I can't exactly paint them without getting fined, so I've settled with for instance sandbox type of things. Color/saturation is a bit over the place but it's mostly due a quick lightening in PS and the original photos are in .NEF/RAW format:

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[Max] I need help! / Migrating lightmix interactiveness to HTML5 or the like.. ?

« on: 2017-09-17, 09:42:51 »

Hi all,

tried searching but came up with no results that would solve or answer my problem. Is there an existing solution to getting interactive renderings "converted" to a www-friendly format?

While my main question would be about the handling of lights since I'm not sure we have all the sufficient, filter kind of render elements to manually build an interactive light setup, I'd also need the possibility to change object color and other such simple tasks so I'm wondering, with the color changes etc, if everything is build up from scratch so to speak it'd pretty fast become bloated and frankly too complicated for me to handle, so if there's a way to easily migrate interactivity of the light mixer to another environment altogether, preferably as a HTML5 solution, I'd be interested in any ideas or references others might have in regards to such a system? This would still have to have the possibility to add other features like changing color based on mask or switching an object to another altogether so before I spend my time learning or pay someone to do research on an area I'm not an expert at, I'd like to know if there are shortcuts here to get a funky web-based thing going :)

Thanks, I'd really appreciate all and any ideas before I start to assemble some horrid piece of code that would ultimately not work at all!

Best regards,
Ville Kiuru

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[Max] I need help! / Is there a way to get displacements working on several Corona material layeres?

« on: 2016-11-12, 17:21:14 »

So clarify since I ran out out space on topic, Corona Layered Material taking into account the displacements of each layer controlled by a mask. As I understood it, only the base layer displacement wil be taken into account when stacking several materials in to a layered material. What I would want to do is create a layered material with several different gravel/sand textures and have their respective displacements in use, and these layers being smoothly blended with, for eample vertex color map. If I've understood correctly and this approach does not work, does anyone have suggestions on how to blend three or more materials on one ground plane and have all their displacement maps correctly up and running, controlled by their layer masks? My main goal here would be not to cut the ground plane in to several pieces to assign standard corona materials per piece but to have smooth transitions between the different materials on one consistent surface.

Thanks, I'd really appreciate any insight!

Ville

6

Hardware / Need help evaluating a Xeon E5-2670 workstation at eBay

« on: 2016-08-15, 12:27:10 »

I was looking at this workstation:

http://www.ebay.com/itm/HP-Z800-LC-2x-X5680-96GB-RAM-500GB-SSD-6TB-HDD-Quadro-6000-Tesla-C2075-Win-7-/291753617232?hash=item43eddee750:g:MIAAAMXQWzNSiAAT

Could one of you more up to date with the technological stuff and price/quality please give me some estimates about this rig overall - my main goal is to get 96GB-128GB RAM, and I checked the CPUs out at Corona benchmark results and they seem to be pretty solid but am I in the right ballpark regarding the price? Also I've never owned a Quadro card - are these beneficial in 3DS Max viewport when dealing with large polygon counts?

I would really appreciate help with this, I'm not too great with numbers to begin with and got started on a heavy epilepsy medication 2 months ago, it seems to really crush my attention span and make precise things like these even more harder. The one thing that bothers me is the 96GB RAM. I know I'd regret it up until I upgraded to 128GB which if I understood right would not even be an option with this motherboard. I should mention apart from the rig being pretty effective (as far as I understand these things:) one thing that has me leaning on this specific seller is that he offers quick shipping to Finland.. for a price of course but all in all I'd rather not wait weeks as I have some heavy duty projects starting right now and would desperately need the extra rendering power ASAP.

So please, guys and girls.. could you please help me out here.. am I making a mistake ordering this rig, or is the price ok? and if it is, as a eBay newbie I'm left wondering if there are any shortcuts to getting the same kind of deal with the quick shipping BUT with the full 128GB RAM? :)

7

[Max] I need help! / Slow UHD cache, RAM usage very different than before (Windows 10 related?)

« on: 2015-11-17, 20:10:52 »

Hi,

switched to Windows 10 about a month ago and this may or may not have something to do with what I'm trying to describe here.

I'm having issues where UHD Cache, after working normally for hours on the same scene,  slows to a crawl (like taking 20-30 minutes when it just a minute ago solved in an instant) when doing something like merging a new object to the scene, sometimes even without any such action - randomly? After waiting the slow UHD cache, the rendering itself is about 30k rays/s total so the problem obviously carries over. This happens on files that get even slightly complex - I haven't kept book but scenes varying from hundres of megabytes to several GB (compress on save is OFF). It usually "corrects" itself for a while when I switch to a different camera, hit render and then cancel and repeat this process a couple times over. Other method is to save the scene and start a new instance of Max and open the scene again, but the problem comes back before long.

I've tried cleaning the files of any empty layers, note tracks or any other trash and merging everything to a fresh scene but no luck. I've noticed when computing secondary GI Corona seems to use memory very sparingly, by which I mean back in Windows 7 the memory load would jump to like 27 gigs right at the beginning of the calculation if that's how much the scene needed but now it shows "memory used" lingering between like 4 to 7 gigs in similar circumstances. I checked  the Windows memory paging files and they are on automatic as I've always had them but I still wonder if it's related to that somehow.

I'm using 3DS Max 2015 and Corona 1.3, had this same issue on daily builds earlier. I'm not sure about version 1.2 and can't test it right now. Plugins I'm relying on in these scenes are Forestpack, Multitexture and Berconmaps, occasionally.. The one plugin that is always present is Forest Pack (and I believe I have the latest version but will double check) and that's pretty much it. No corona proxies are present most of the time. Disabled legacy materials with the converter, overall ran the converter in it's entirety etc but no luck. Any ideas, no matter how far fetched would be appreciated at this point because I can't find a cause.

I'm on an i7-4930K, factory clocking, 32 GB of RAM.

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[Max] I need help! / Legacy mode automation

« on: 2015-02-24, 23:41:44 »

Is there already a way to automate the migration of all Legacy mode materials in a scene to the new GGX or GXC or whatever it's called? because judging from dailies the legacy mode is ticked on by default. Might be a good time for someone more talented than myself to share a script :)

EDIT: Oh ok the Corona Converter script over at Goodies-subforum has an option for this, it seems!

EDIT 2: Haha :) Yes thank you for that. Makes the switch easier.

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[Max] I need help! / Combining two renders in PS or AE, to further reduce noise ?

« on: 2015-02-18, 16:46:27 »

Same camera angle, lighting, everything. Let's say the other one rendered for 4 hours, and the other for 3. Is there a way in Photoshop or After Effects, perhaps through layer blending modes to merge these two so when combined, noise could be negated even further?

I'd appreciate it if any of you could share some insight!

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[Max] I need help! / What driver version are you guys using with Geforce cards?

« on: 2014-12-19, 08:47:50 »

First, I know it's not Coronas fault but something inside of Max.

I recently made the mistake of updating my GTX 670 drivers for no real reason, and after that I get constant freezes with material editor. It can be anything from trying to load a bitmap for diffuse channel, or just changing standard Max material to Corona material. Sometimes the freezes are about a minute in length, oftentimes I've let is load for 10 whole minutes before forcing Max to shut down. It gets really annoying, even more so knowing it's because I upgraded the drivers.. so any suggestions regarding the best version (no lag in material editor) Geforce drivers or any other solution to this problem would be greatly appreciated!

EDIT: forgot to mention I'm using Max 2015 with the latest SP

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[Max] General Discussion / Animation rendering

« on: 2014-11-13, 05:49:43 »

Recently I've been toying around with an idea for a simple camera drive through a room. If I wanted a HD-TV resolution, would I just select the one from the Max presets or would it for any reason be advisable to double the resolution?

Also, which render farms have people used Corona with and would you recommend them?

Thanks!

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[Max] Resolved Feature Requests / An option to have unsupported materials defaulted to a neutral gray

« on: 2014-06-12, 08:33:03 »

It's sometimes a pain in the ass in Max to go through an imported Revit file with one hundred unsupported materials, because they show up bright red while rendering. Maybe an option to override them to a neutral gray would make sense?

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[Max] Resolved Bugs / Reflection glossiness seems off somehow

« on: 2014-02-12, 12:50:35 »

Using Alpha 5, I'm having difficulties getting glossy reflections to look glossy enough. A quick render, the wood is supposed to be almost matte:



Reflection glossiness is set to 0,05 which is  really extreme, yet the reflection behaves much like Vray glossiness at around 0,6. Any ideas?

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[Max] Resolved Bugs / memory handling

« on: 2013-12-13, 09:53:40 »

Hi,

I'm wondering if anyone else has issues with memory handling in Corona? Sometimes I get the "WTF" error box and Max crashes even though there's still nearly 10 gigs of memory left to use. Also since I started rendering with Corona sometimes when I press "render" a Windows popup appears, telling me I'm running low on memory and Windows will force close enough programs to free more memory. I've never seen this popup before even when rendering large scenes in Vray.

FWIW, this it with Windows 7 and with 2 different rigs.

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[Max] General Discussion / animation - parsing the scene

« on: 2013-11-20, 10:37:41 »

I'm doing a preview animation, but with my scene using about 24GB ram it's proving to take more time parsing the scene between frames than the actual rendering (1 min) takes. Is there anything I can do to improve this, apart from touching the scene itself?