The resource monitor is available in earlier versions of Windows as well. I have win 7 on one of my machines and it's there. They added a couple features to 10, but you can still monitor which apps are using which cpu in earlier versions.

I prefer using CPUID HWMonitor. CPUID monitors everything about the hardware on your system, right down to fans and temperatures. Get the portable version though, not the setup version. You can run it right from a USB stick.

At this point and time, I can tell you it's a terrible time to buy a new GPU card. Terrible time. The prices are very inflated right now due to the data mining fad saturating the market. They are buying all the new cards by the tens of thousands and inflating costs. If I were you, I'd go with a used or refurbrished card right now, and wait for prices to drop. Just be careful if you buy a used card. Find out what it was used for. Because if it was used for data mining, then chances are it's been run at 100 percent it's entire life, and will probably not live much longer.

Woah. I never saw anyone enable ALL of the addons. I think doing that could definitely cause some issues.

Great work John. I like those renders at the beginning.

I took a look at that Bryce tutorial, and it seems that we can reproduce that effect in just about any 3d app that supports rotational arrays, like Blender! I don't see what would prevent us from doing that same thing here in Blender with a few Array modifiers. Has anyone ever tried it yet? Bryce uses a very old fashioned raytrace engine, so rendering can be done with Blender Internal, and Cycles wouldn't even be needed for that style of render.

I don't know if Lux has seen that image yet, but if he's reading this, take a look at that deviant art link Lobo posted of the Bryce tutorial. There doesn't seem to be anything there we couldn't reproduce in Blender, or is there?

Lobo3433 posted at 2:41PM Wed, 26 October 2016 - #4287902

Hello John

First excellent tutorial I always do like when you do them for Blender and I encountered no issue following the tutorial from start to finish so mega I know you make most of these for 3D printing but I do like taking the models in to Bryce and using some pre-made set ups that I have for abstracts and rendering them out even thou get annoyed that no new updates have been made to Bryce to make it more 64 bit friendly so I can take advantage of all my memory and render at higher resolutions but none the less here is a start of something I rendered out using the model as center piece not totally happy yet with the colors might tweak it more

WHOA! Lobo3433, this is awesome! I'm a big fan of surreal effects in 3d. I know most of the time we call it abstract, and indeed this is abstract, but there is also a hint of realism going on here, with reflections and such, so I tend to consider it more like surrealism. Either way, it's VERRRY cool work! Did you duplicate the object and use deformers to get that environement effect going on?

Well done, John! Btw, don't worry about the proportional editing values here. It really doesn't matter how close or far away you are from the object in world space, because proportional editing works almost identical to soft selection, except there aren't color gradient cues to help you see the area of influence. In other words, a proportional size of 1.0 is still influencing the same distance from the selected polygons or vertices up close as it would far away, just like soft selection. It also makes no difference if you're in ortho or perspective views. It affects the mesh the same. Try it out for yourself and see. The info you gave in the video works just fine!

If I may suggest one thing though, it is that you should use the proportional editing "connected" option for some of the rotations! I noticed when I had the pentagons selected towards the last part of the tutorial, increasing the proportional size started to affect the outer parts of the mesh, and that's probably why you had to use the corrective smooth modifier. I used the connected option instead, and it came out nice and clean!

LuxXeon posted at 9:55AM Wed, 21 September 2016 - #4284101

The real-time PBR material support and GPU speed improvements are the most attractive features to me. I'd been working with 3d-Coat quite often, and all my production models going forward will support PBR textures and materials, so that's a very welcome improvement.

I love 3Dcoat, especially for the automatic unwrapping. About physical based rendering,. Which PBR standard is Blender using? What i mean is, will it follow the Marmoset standard, or something different? I noticed in PBR software, like 3Dcoat, there are options when exporting the maps to use certain normal map types and different workflow preset types for other maps, like using Spec/Gloss workflow or the Metal/Roughness workflow. Which is the most common one, and what will Blender materials use? If I export my models to Octane render, I usually pick the Spec/Gloss combo, because Octane doesn't support a metal channel.

jcarp, thank you very much for taking the time to provide all that feedback! Really useful information, and exactly the honest opinions I was hoping to hear. Much appreciated my friend!

I don't know the law for this type of thing, but I'm sure a company with the deep pockets BMW has, along with some excellent representation could get whatever they want out of the situation. If they decide not to go for damages, there won't be any payouts. If they do, well Turbosquid could be in for a long ride. If they are capable of getting those damages is one thing, but anything is possible when you have millions to spend. We will see I guess.

I have an old Wacom that has been with me for digital painting for a long time, but I need to get something more modern to aid in sculpting. To me, sculpting with the mouse is like painting with a brick. I forget where I saw that quote, but it definitely applies to my work.

jcarp, what benefits do you feel you have gained from using the Cintiq over a tablet? I've been looking into getting one, but not sure I can justify the extra cash at this point. Would love to hear some hands on comparisons. I had gotten so used to my tablet, I found myself doing everything on the computer with it, and my poor mouse never saw any action. Nowadays, my tablet is so old it has actually shorted out my usb connector, and hasn't worked right since.

@sinner: BMW doesn't care about free advertising, they're already well established. Besides that, they are at the point where they can afford to license their brand out to other companies and projects who themselves would benefit from using a BMW in their productions. That is to say BMW is known well enough now to where using their name in a production can benefit that company, not the other way around. So all BMW cares about in that regard is protecting their image. If they are going to continue to license their name out, they absolutely need to protect their interests by managing closely who does and who does not use their brand for profit.

I know it's a difficult concept to grasp sometimes, because we should all be so lucky in life as to have something of such value, where people are constantly willing to pay us to use our brand in their works, but this is where BMW is at now, so why should they let anyone make money off their brand likeness when there's plenty of opportunity for them to be paid well for it?

Honestly, the most widely used 3d package in the professional industry today is probably... drumroll please... ZBRUSH. Yep, Zbrush is used by every single VFX and game studio I can think of offhand, including Disney, ILM, and many more. In fact, regardless if the studio is using Maya, 3dsmax, Cinema4D, or whatever... Zbrush plays a huge roll in the production pipeline from start to finish. These days, all character models are done in Zbrush first, then retopologized and brought into the animation package. It's actually fair to say if you know Zbrush really well, and can sculpt well enough, you have a chance to land a job somewhere in the CG industry these days.

dr_bernie posted at 4:42AM Wed, 31 August 2016 - #4281004

Well it all depends by what you mean by affordable.

For $199.- subscription fees per year you can get the full-blown Houdini. This is the most pro that a 3D app can get. If you have pro aspirations then this is the way to go. Houdini will open the door to the most prominent production studios in the world (while Carrara will only get you laughed at).

I am only a hobbyist doing occasional 3D for fun, so Houdini is way above my head, but if you consider that 3 years of Houdini subscription will only cost you $600.- then I am sure that you will agree that this is the software deal of the century.

I'd like to chime in about Houdini if I may. Not every large production studio uses Houdini. If you research it thoroughly, Houdini is primarily used as a VFX package in combination with some other large all-in-one solution like Maya. The strong point of Houdini is the incredibly powerful particle system and scripted, procedural workflow it can bring to a VFX pipeline, and that's primarily how it fits in. The people who specialize in Houdini are usually technical specialists focused on high quality particle effects and physics sims. However, it's usually tied tightly to Maya in one way or another along the pipeline. Honestly, the most "pro" application you can get in the world depends entirely on the field of 3d you are interested in.

For film and VFX you will likely find 90% of the really important studios use Maya. Perhaps half of those use Maya with Houdini in some way. If you are interested in next-gen game development (which is approaching the technical aspect that CG movies were doing about 5 to 10 years ago anyway), then you'll likely need to learn 3dsmax or Maya LT. 3dsmax is also found in some VFX studios too, but not as much as Maya, and usually only in the modeling portion of the pipeline. If you are looking to get into architectural visualization or television mograph stuff, then you'll likely encounter most studios using either Cinema4D or 3dsmax also.

Head over to CGTalk, hang out there for about a month in the forums and you'll see what the big studios are mostly using.

I think Carrara or Blender are great for the hobbyist. I lean towards Blender myself as an independant freelance artist, because it's far superior in the modelling aspect, but nothing seems to compare to Carrara for working nice with Poser stuff. It's ideal to get your feet wet with a real 3d package from Poser before moving up to something more.

Yup, it's sure interesting. I wonder how many of those models have ironically shown up in BMW-sponsored commercials or movies, and maybe some were even used in a few of BMW's own car commercials. On a similar note, I know for a fact many of the IKEA furniture models that were on Turbosquid and other model resource sites not so long ago were actually modeled for use in IKEA's own furniture showcase magazine (which happens to be 90% CG renders now, not photographs), and yet they filed suit to have them taken down.

Most of the "cars" we see in commercials these days are very much CG, and a lot of high-end studios license models from Squid and other places in order to make deadlines, so there's a decent chance some of those were actually used in a car commercial at one time or another. I can see how reselling the models under the BMW name can be interpreted as an infringement of Trademark, but I can't see how these models could possibly have harmed BMW or their subsidiaries in any way financially, so I'm not sure they can claim damages here. I think they can only have them removed.