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Messages - vkiuru

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1
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

2
re: the latest render, maybe try to split the large area to two more separate like spaces? Also the floor looks a bit busy with the largea area.. not always but oftentimes the planks would be directed towards the main window openings so in this case 90 degree rotation and maybe scaling the floor boards up a bit would help - or maybe the camera FOV is too large. Anyway it's a good start.

3
Hi guys - on the latest corona daily after a render is done and starts the 'cleaning up' process, it doesnt complete it and MAX freezes.
anyone else having this issue?

Since yesterday we are having the same issue very, very often! :-(

Thanks,

Dionysios -

Same for me rondomly at end of rendering MAX freeze and only option is to close the process.

Config

dual Xeon 2687v3 64gb ram.

Thanks.

I have the same issue on both my Xeon workstations. I have sent multiple files to Corona team. I have a feeling something isnt playing nice with the xeon architecture. Its got to the point that even if I mouse click on the VFB it freezes for a minute or 2 and sometimes for a very long time. Highly frustrating

Xeon build here also. This might be old and in any case isn't a long term solution but sometimes when Max freezes while cleaning up I've found it helps to go to Task Mangager and set the affinity to just one core, hit ok. Sometimes - and only sometimes - this gets things going again within the next 5 seconds. Not sure why this works or if it's widely tried but wanted to chime in since it has saved me a bunch of rendertime a couple of times.

4
Gallery / Re: Forest Roads
« on: 2018-12-29, 16:35:59 »
Lovely mood. Environmental lighting works real good here! Did you enhance it in post or is it straight out of the frame buffer? the fog, I mean :)

5
They weren't even honest about those 0.28x 0.28m scans :- ) Apparently it was all "1m" scans because they didn't write it. And then you would look into JSON file...and what the hell is this.

Teddy replied to me, apparently Bridge will retain basic functionality to browse even if you don't pay. But not integrations. (Corona scripts were done by Dubcat for free ! Not them).

Maybe I am spoiled by the heavily manually retouched scans from Textures.com. But seriously, it's night&day, go compare it :- ).

Oh, really? lol @ the ,28m scans :D

Thanks for the insight - I wasn't fully up to date it seems. Some time ago when I installed the then-latest version of bridge and the connection between Max stopped working and now guess I falsely believed it to be a case of activation issue because my account was inactive and it kept nagging about something. And then I was busy busy busy, and it left a bad taste. Just now I downloaded the latest Bridge client and export worked well, and I might add it is faster and lighter than before now that they have some Max integration there as well. So there's that, at least.

I'd still like an option to just gain access to Mixer and only pay for the library assets when I see something that would suit my needs. Mixer may not be the fastest editor, at least the version I last tried, also it still made my GPU fans yell loud as hell and Windows almost grinded to a halt when I exported something with many layers and at 8k px, but I like it still.

Textures.com is great. IIRC it started as a completely free service way back before 2010 even. Maybe it had some sort of bandwith limit per month but yes it's awesome and has come a long way since, of course, with PBR and scanned surfaces and the like. But to think how long it was just pretty much absolutely free (as cgtextures.com) with some very nice base textures is astonishing, even without the crafted scans you mentioned. Glad to support the site - didn't know it was one guy. That's impressive :O

But i agree their pricing is odd and they seem to post similar looking scans constantly. They should be covering the basics off before sending me scans of angkor wat.

Yes the pricing is still inconsistent. Also if I understood you correctly, I agree some tutorials would have been nice from the start. A big thank you goes to Juraj for that one screenshot that demonstrated how leaves could easily be cropped from an atlas in Max Slate Editor :-)


6
I will only add one thing to this:

For years, I've read how people on cgarchitect, usually from US, claimed their prices based on their living costs. This is totally irrelevant on global market. It's obvious you need to charge enough to make living & prosper, that is the base of any business.
But it's not what should justify your prices. Quality & Service should.

And thus, it works vice versa and this is what lot of people never get. Do you live in some random shithole in middle of nowhere ? Your living costs don't matter. If your quality is the same or better then from someone from San Francisco or London City downtown, you should and need to charge the same.

Always charge the highest amount of money you can get for your service, that is how business works. It doesn't matter if you're from small rural village of Lithunia living in house of your grandparents. Your image quality rivals NYC studio ? Charge 5000 euros.

Not only will you massively benefit, everyone benefits.


Never get a client because you are cheaper. If someone chose you on price, you've already lost.

Oh, without a doubt, this.

I need to stress my point was more about the way you need to find out the bottom price at which you can support yourself/family and if you can't reach it, you need to think twice about entering the field all by yourself.

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Oh f*ck thank god, so I'm not the only one and the first one to chime in happens to be someone who seems very rational from all I've gathered!

Thanks for taking the time writing them - I didn't know they'd changed the model re: frozen assets. I first wrote about it when the site was quite new and I had been a customer for.. 6 months? The response was just silly - basically they saw nothing wrong with the model because some stock photo sites used something like it as well. I'm not even sure if I wrote back, it was just so against common sense.

I agree the quality of the scans is subpar at times - I might be less picky, though. You have a more keen eye to detail than me. And, unless they've changed it too, the deal where if you pay to get 8k px resolution, they charge 2 credits for 8k surfaces? can't vouch for this since I haven't paid the the last month or two, but IIRC even if all they have is a 4k res surface they still charge 2 credits for it because, well, you've bought a subscription that allows 8k px surfaces which comes with the cost of 2 credits per surface :D

I like playing with Mixer but it stresses me out some day I might need it and it's not there for use unless I pay for it and/or the mud surfaces and palm leaves you mentioned. They've had about two years to think the subscription models through.. I wonder how much feedback they get, how things like these can still exist when they indeed claim to have processes that cast a long shadow against competition. Easy to use, sure, at times, but what on earth are you charging me for with the export-thingie. It still crashes half the time, ffs!

Also, I'd never have wasted my time or money getting the surface maps if I'd guessed they're gonna start charging for Mixer as well. I can understand there's reasoning behind it if you're only serving large studios but the small 0,34m "scans" of concrete are quite useless for a one man shop by themselves, and to pay a price just so I can mix a dozen of of them every now and then is a bit "meh."

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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?

9
You've got a good conversation going already, not much to add (except in a way it pains me to see professionals who easily win a project because they can offer lower price as we have global differences in living expenses :D )

But that's the one thing you've been circling around and I'd emphasize it once more: you need to figure out your monthly expenses (not just your job but living; rent, food, electricity, extra for clothes etc + taxes and something for your savings account) and there's pretty much what you *should* be getting, at bare minimum. How you can pay for licenses and do work for $10 per image or anything alike, I  can't fathom.

Anyway, good luck and do keep in mind you need to make more than just what covers the models you need to buy for the next project etc. You have a life on top of the job- it's something that is never free!

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Off-Topic / Re: How to change Hard drive virtualram?
« on: 2018-09-09, 10:24:33 »
System disk always  should have free space  for properly running programs, if it will be full then you cannot run programs. Also if corona start using  hdd  it will rendering very slow and may be not stable. Best choice to add  more ram not virtual. You may change disk for store pagefile though

To be fair Corona memory handling is pretty poor when using stuff like Forest Pack etc. I have 128Gt RAM and oftentimes find rendering slow down to like 10-15 min/1 pass when rendering at 4k res and all the scattering elements unhidden. Unless it's something else entirely on my end, don't expect miracles just by adding RAM.

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Frankly I'm amazed this one has slipped by every engine after it was again introduced in Vray, after all the help it gave in the form of VrayPattern. Bought it the second it was available and the memory handling was just beautiful. FYI as I recall, it's not a memory-friendly tool to substitute to scattering forests or the like, rather very efficient for close up details like fabric of the like. Anything on the foreground benefitted of the original one and the forest patterns were on par with the usual pattern mehods.  I mean it is really efficient with memory usage but don't expect it to be any better when scattering large areas. That's how it's been with Vray and  FStorm, at least :)

12
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:




13
+1 for better integration for fluids.

14
Wow, very much appreciated! Thanks man!

15
I've been on a nearly 4 month FStorm vacation and liked the results it gave me. Haven't been paying attention to Corona during the time and have a lot of catching up to do, so first I wanted to ask if this discussion has been picked up by the devs?

Yes please write some comparisons. I wanted to look into it too but the lawsuit surrounding it has put me off testing it in a production environment

I've been testing out F-Storm on a few product shots and have to say it's really amazing. I don't know what they are doing but the way bitmaps are handled is really something - textures appear to come out much sharper (and not artificial "sharpen tool" sharper). For example at grazing angles and in fine reflection/glossy maps, textures are much clearer

More on topic: The tone mapping in F-Storm is godly. It's as close to DSLR like as you can get from any render engine I've used. Everything just looks so "real" and photographically punchy - it's actually quite a task to produce a badly tone mapped image in FStorm.

Now if only Corona could copy FStorms tone mapping 1:1 (and FStorms geopattern) that would be insane. Corona has too many great features and great ease of use so it will still be my daily driver (until 32gb+ GPU's start coming out...).

+1 re: the magical stuff around FStorm :D

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