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Coronas Volumetrics are great. In my experience they just take aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaages to sample. I've had scenes where my rendertimes went up by over 1000% over the same scene without volumetrics, even with single bounce. Compared to RS that is very, very slow. Then again, Redshift currently only supports single bounce volumetrics so...

Hi guys, let's collect and share relevant "Black / Cyber - Friday / Monday / Week / Season"-Deals 😀

I tripped over a Black Friday deal at Lenovo at through their "Perks at Work" program. These programs are available though most US employers, insurance programs, and/or car associations like AAA. This program was not advertised nor were any notifications sent that it was going on. I just went to the site on a lark in the final 4 hours before it expired. It expired at midnight last night. Here is what it entailed: 1) Up to a 61% savings on all PC's 2) On top of that a coupon code netting you an additional 9% savings 3) On top of all that, you get back 20X points (spend $100 and you get 2,000 points. Each point is worth 1 penny USD toward a future purchase). In short 20% off. So for kicks and giggles, I configured a P620 workstation: 1) Ryzen Threadripper Pro 3945WX (4 GHz, 12 cores) 2) 128 Gb of DDR4 3200 MHz ECC DRAM 3) Nvidia Quadro RTX-A6000 GPU (48Gb) 4) 2 TB SSD M.2 2280 PCIe Gen 4 Boot drive 5) Two 4 TB 7200 HDD (RAID 1) 6) DVD - RW Drive 7) Intel 9260 802.11AC with Blue Tooth Lenovo cost: $16,194 Works at Perks Cost after all discounts: $5300 Still a lot of money --- but what a machine it would have been. For many, many, many, many reasons I had to walk away from it. I did not sleep well last night. Dave

Magix, Ashampoo and Affinity suite has interesting discounts. Ashampoo has some small video editing apps Magix has MusicMaker (irrelevant but I like it) and some video editing/compositing software. Affinity has the well known Designer, Photo and Publisher. These are cool and cheap apps for anyone who wants to composite renders from C4D or use 2D vector designs to import in C4D. (still looking for laptop so don't leave out hardware related deals 😉)

IMHO --- Thanassis is the Ben Kingsley of the C4D tutorial world! Great delivery - concise, meaningful and with lots of heart! Dave Actually, I wonder if they are in fact both the same person?

Hrvoje, Chris Schmidt, Noseman (Athanasios Pozantzis) Contrafibularities (or Wolf 4D on YouTube) --- I love his C4D modeling tutorials...and the growing list of Blender tutorials as well. and while not strictly C4D but rather Insydium - Bob Walmsley.

Kitbash 3D 50% off, all kits https://kitbash3d.com/

Yeah no. Studio Drivers should always work and I personally never had any issues with them. Occasionally there are games that don't run at all without the latest driver update but in that case I just wait. Lagging behind in drivers for years is not an option for many people, especially for those that use their machine for more than work. And guess what, it's not always feasable to have a dedicated 3D PC and a gaming PC on top of that. Why buy a system with one or more GPUs just to let it rot when not working on it and buy another machine just for gaming. Drivers have always been a pain in the butt and it always will be.

He is a great guy indeed... and you're not bad yourself brother! Very much appreciated!

Thanassis is great guy, he is super fun to hang out with 🙂

OMG! I had the exact same history with modo....both how I was encouraged to get into it and my buyers remorse afterward. Interestingly enough, wasn't there a post from that person who said he really is no longer using modo? His artistic interests were always with modeling Leggo objects (and they were very well done) but finally decided that if his interests were with Leggo's, just build real Leggo models. Makes sense. Modo is a great modeler but I just could not get my head wrapped around an object manager that classified ALL scene objects as Meshes. Create three cubes...get one "mesh" listing in the OM. That an a host of other usability issues with understanding their OM was what kept me from fully embracing the program. Now that was back in the 401 days so maybe that has changed but modo's OM was a real barrier to my ability to efficiently navigate through the program. Now, the gold standard in OM's is undoubtedly C4D's OM. So even Blender's OM falls a little short there. But it does point out the importance of the OM as that is the primary method for "driving" the software. I was told that the modo OM was quite effective but you needed to understand the reasons and benefits behind its design. Okay...granted I needed to adopt a new paradigm and eagerly tried to both understand it and internalize it. Sorry....didn't happen. It was like learning the old HP calculators where instead of just typing "5 x 5 =" you typed "5, 5, x, =". Some paradigm shifts are just too counter to how our brains are wired to think, read and express information. Therefore, I just could not work both C4D and modo at the same time without tripping over that paradigm shift. Sometimes being different for whatever reason or intent is not always smart.