Rob

Thank you all in advance for your assistance with my problem!

I have been a freelance 3D artist for about 5 years and have an amazing desktop workstation as well as a compact rendernode and a 5 server renderfarm. I work on 3D Studio Max with Vray render.

I have moved to a small office rather than working from home in order to separate my home life from my work... Unfortunately this seems to be taking me away from my home life even more since I have to run to my office sometimes for revisions,etc... I was researching mobile workstations but really don't want to spend a lot of money... I can keep my compact node home for the laptop to send renders, but I'm wondering about the graphics processor. I have been so used to the quadro series cards but am wondering if a high powered gaming card would suffice since that would give me more cuda cores for my buck... I would do really rough work on the laptop and small revisions and even full projects if they are small on that and wouldn't need to travel back and forth all the time. Is it REALLY necessary to get a quadro series mobile graphics processor to work on things here and there? I have been looking for a personal laptop anyway and would like something that can do both obviously. I don't want to spend over $1500 and I'm having a hard time finding an actual mobile workstation... But specs on a gaming laptop I can find something amazing easily under $1500 all over the place.

Thanks a lot!

Rob

I had a dream last Monday night about a good friend of mine that passed away last year, and in the dream I picked him up and he said "I have to go get my friend" and it was another good friend of mine as well as another person who I can't seem to figure out who exactly it is but it's one of 2 people I'm pretty sure.... The NEXT day on Tuesday my other good friend committed suicide.... Is this a real thing?? do things like this really happen? I'm freaked out.... and now want to know exactly who the 3rd person is because one of the 2 friends are in rehab at the moment so I'm worried.......

I'm a freelancer. Part of what I do is render animations on my servers which in total utilize 120 processor cores. When I render animations, the render time varies and so does the cost per rendering.

Currently when I do my invoicing, I take the amount of time it took one animation to render and use a (25 cents per core hour) basis to charge. Here is an example:

One animation took my machines 10 hours to render. that's 10 hours using 120 cores. The math I do to get my cost is 25 cents per core hour: 120 x 10 = 1200 core hours. 1200 core hours @ .25/hr is $300.

I personally get no enjoyment out of doing math equations, so I would like to create some sort of "thing" on my computer that I can have as a template where I can just input how many hours the render took, and it will give me my answer, boom, done....

Any ideas???

Thanks a lot!! I know this is probably an easy task for someone who knows what they are doing, but I don't know where to start with it.

Thanks in advance for any answers.

Rob

I am in the 3D graphics and design field, and have been outsourcing some of my work to a fellow artist who lives in Serbia. in the year 2013, I have paid him close to $5,000 and am trying to figure out how I am going to write him off on my taxes... There are many ways to go about fudging things, but I'm looking for a legitimate and 100% legal answer to this issue.

What category can I put him under without getting a red flag?

Thanks in advance for anyone's answers!

My wife just got an LLC for her business and I am creating all of the logos, business card designs, etc.... Do I legally need to put an address on her business cards, car magnets, etc? This is New York State, so I want to make sure we follow the rules properly and not get fined.

Thanks for your help! I can't seem to find anything online anywhere... very annoying

I have been into photography for the past 2 years, and still learning lots about the mixtures of a camera's aperture, shutter speed, ISO, and what they do and why. My understanding is that if you want the background of an image to blur leaving the subject in focus, you would bring the F-stop (aperture) as low as possible for the most background blur. Here's my question now:

I just got a new HTC Evo 4G LTE with an 8mega pixel camera and an aperture of 2.0, and max ISO of 800. I'm not sure the shutter speed as I don't think you can have manual control over that, as well as you can't have manual control over the aperture. When I take a picture, the entire background is crystal clear as is the subject and I am wondering why? if the camera is set on a permanent aperture of 2.0, every picture should have a serious depth of field look to it.

What is the difference between a camera phone and an SLR that would be able to throw away the logistics of aperture like that?

Thanks!!

I have a series of buttons inside a movie clip that are to navigate my pages. They are part of a graphic and need to move together. Buttons work fine, but my question is this....... frame 1-30 is website opening animation, things popping up, etc...... frame 31-60 is reverse and closing up. Stop script at frame 30. In the movie clip, I can't get my button to play frame 31 on my main timeline. It only wants to navigate the movie clip's timeline. Is there some sort of variable I need to be using??? If so which and how? Thanks a lot. Ripping my hair out

People ask me all the time where they can get Sound clips of movie dialogues or monologues, funny ones, dramatic ones, ect... for animation purposes. I don't have any clue as to a site that has this... There are tons of sites that have 3D models and textures, but none for sound clips to practice animating to. Anybody have ideas or resources?

Thanks a lot in advance.

I am trying to create a flash contact form, although I am having problems because I don't know much about Flash. This is my website: http://www.3d1on1.com/ and I would like to insert a Flash contact form where I can create questions and have the answers e-mailed to my e-mail address. I teach 3D Studio Max and Maya online, in 1 on 1 courses, so if there is anybody who can show me how to create these forms, I will gladly return the favor by showing them a thing or 2 in either 3D Max or Maya, free of charge.

Otherwise, if you know any really good tutorials on how to set this up, please direct me to them!!

Thanks a lot in advance to anybody that can help!! :-)

seems there is the proper openings in the inside of the rear doors on my father in law's van, although from the outside, it's flat... He has been forced to keep commercial plates just because he has no rear windows on it. Can I buy the window trim for the back doors somewhere and cut it out and install them? Please help! it will save him much gas mileage traveling.