Meet Betty Bad-PG13

[mewrei]

3d render of the popular heroin, Betty Bad from one of WildTangent's games.

http://www.deviantart.com/deviation/27043603/

[Boris]

Very nice. You use Max 7?

Boris's saying of the day:

If at first you don't succeed, destroy any evidence that you ever attempted it.

[mewrei]

Yesh I use Max 7. I enjoy the material editor. I'm think of switching over to SoftImage|XSI 5.0 Advanced for the fur and face components or Cinema 4D because of its excellent support for NURBS and the advanced renderer it has.

Or I might just stay with Max and get Max 8. I haven't fully decided.

[Boris]

I use Max 8. I'm fortunate I have a very large amount of pluging for Max, for fur and hair I use a plugin called furfx which I think ships with Max 8, but I don't know if it is the same as the plugin because when I switched over from Max 6 I transferred all the licences for the plugins to Max 8 and I have never used the furfx that comes with Max 8. But Max 8 is a very friendly program.

Boris's saying of the day:

If at first you don't succeed, destroy any evidence that you ever attempted it.

[mewrei]

Its hairfx now and its also a $600 plugin. It might ship with Max 8 but I didn't look to hard. Unfortunately I'm only an independent business owner and I still need software like eyeon's Fusion 5. Plus I need to put together a cluster for rendering.

I hope to use my web design talents to boost my funds to the point where I can afford Max 8 and Fusion 5. Fusion is $5000 on it own. I also want to get in the business before I spend upwards of $10,000 in capitol. I don't want to put myself out there and all of a sudden, uh oh, no business. That would be disappointing.

I downloaded the trial for Max 8 while I was away on vacation and loved it. Max 7 has alot going for it but so does 8. Not a tremendous difference though.

I'll also probably need to get a plugin for Max or the command line version of mental ray so I can run rendering over my server cluster. Its likely going to be a cluster of PS3's which have an insane floating point performance. I also hear tell that the PS3 runs Linux native. That would be good to run custom software on without any hardware modifications.

[Boris]

Your right, the name of the plugin is called hairfx, furfx is the name of the effect in the atmospheric effects panel.

The first plugin you should get for network rendering is final render stage 1 because you only need one licence to run it over a network.

The only real difference between Max 7 and 8 I think is that Max 8 ships with hairfx and clothfx.

The best advice I can give you about starting your own business is get a large some of money up front that way if your client decides he doesn't want your services any more or they just disappear you wont be out of pocket by very much.

Boris's saying of the day:

If at first you don't succeed, destroy any evidence that you ever attempted it.

[mewrei]

Yeah I'm paying everything in cash. My dad is a small business owner so I am modeling him.

I already have Adobe Photoshop CS2 and Macromedia Studio MX 2004. I had been working around town all summer saving for those two. 3ds Max likewise. Amazing that I was able to get them all.