So tonight I’ll finally have the last tutorial up for the Painting & Detailing Intro tutorial. My main issue was with Camtasia. For some reason, on my main machine it was having an issue with getting any speed in rendering in this final part. Was it a broken project file? Was it just the machine? Was it the footage? I recorded it all the same as usual, so I couldn't pinpoint it, but I did I go through all the usual troubleshooting steps. Ultimately I didn't want to render on my Macbook Pro because I figured the time difference would be too great, but considering the issues and time to market, I ultimately gave in. I’m not sure how long it took to render, but it was reasonable, and I finally got the project out. So sometimes in production you can’t get caught up in the troubleshooting too hard, sometimes you just have to immediately go to plan B, or the B machine and take the supposed “hit”. Anyway I think the final chapter went well.

• 01. Painting & Detailing Intro
• 02. UV Editing and materials in Bodypaint
• 03. Exporting for Zbrush
• 04. Importing into Zbrush
• 05. Alternate UVs in Zbrush, and cleanup in C4D
• 06. Painting and adding detail with Spotlight
• 07. Exporting back to C4D

The training caps out at about 4 hours and 59mins. I hope you enjoy it as much as I did recording it. Moving on finally, the next training I want to do takes me back to some of my 9-5 work I used to do in the military and government. In this one I’m going to teach you how to Renderfarm. I may or may not have mentioned it previously, but with this new television production I’m doing I've run into an inevitable problem many 2d compositors and 3D animators are going to face. I can’t get preview or HQ content out to the client to review or release fast enough. A lot of the production has them pushing the schedule far back to accommodate the render times. I’d been looking at render farms for some time because I realized on even my most simple of animated scenes, that especially with GI, it would take 6 months to a year to produce a 120 minute film. I seek to do a regular 24 minute or so animated productions, so that’s a little unacceptable. This particular television production takes 6-8 or so hours to render on my LGA 2011, with the Core i7 3820. It mostly consists of After Effects projects mingled with Premiere Pro, using some interesting plugins like Video Copilot’s Element 3D, and stuff from Red Giant. Not to mention it also uses Keylight for some green screen stuff. These plugins can be relativity intense, and After Effects embedding in Premiere is certainly a speedy convenient workflow, but you pay in render times and some real time editing. Real time editing is another bottle neck I’ll discuss in detail later when I've got that toned down, but the point is I’d like to get footage out to the client at semi decent settings for review much faster. To do so I can’t beef up my machine much more. I’m using just about all the latest and greatest. I could upgrade to the hex core, or even get a production server, but a friend of mine has a dual socket Xeon Hex Core beast like that, and things really aren't too much faster. You need to bring more machines into the mix, and split the load. So I finally fell on Smedge. Like most renderfarm managers the interface takes some getting used to, but in terms of operation it works well. It’s the first farm manager I've used that was able to easily find all my cross platform machines and get jobs going nicely. It also has a quick easy setup and easily allows tweaks to the network flow to achieve a better throughput. For this next tutorial because of the technical nature of renderfarms I’ll be able diving into my Network Admin bag and pulling out some tricks of the trade from there. As usual I’ll be very detailed every step of the way, giving you the how and why of each operation. I’m looking forward to this one and I hope you are too. Eldiren out!