I’ve worked for free and will probably do it again, but not if you ask me to! So please don’t bother

My friend and fellow CG artist Fabio Palvelli spoke on this subject in one of his great vlogs: Youtube video. 

He covers some of the common questions on the matter and this post is what I feel should be added to the delicate topic. 

Go check him out, he is known to be funny on occasions – oh and he is also the face of the amazing D2 Conference I wrote about last year. (I really should get paid for all this praise…)

Creatives Are Weird

The creative business is an odd business. There’s no denying it.

In most industries, “free” always comes with a catch, but we as creatives tend to be so passionate about our field of work and enjoy it so much (at times), that doing work for free isn’t just something that happens once in a while, it’s almost expected of us.

So when a potential client expects you to work for free, there’s nothing like a good tweet:

• You are a student or single with no responsibilities and lots of time.
• You got a family to provide for and have little to no spare time.

Should you be compensated differently based on the time you have available? I don’t think so.

It doesn’t really matter if you spend the time you have on something unproductive anyway. I don’t know, maybe you spend it on yet another personal project. Testing different bokeh effects on a shallow DOF shot of some stupid plant and light fixture in a “Scandinavian” apartment that no one (but your Facebook group) cares about – instead of doing meaningful work.

Ahem…

What I’m getting at, is that it’s very hard to give advice that will work for everyone.

There is however one key thing I think should be the rule for everyone no matter their situation:

“Never take on a client who asks you to do free work”

You are the one who decides when, to whom and under what circumstances you’ll offer to work for free. Simple as that. Doing free work is something you choose to do. Not something you are asked to do.

If the client asks you to deliver your service without payment, he is simply trying to take advantage of you. I don’t like these kind of people. There is no value exchange. Only value taking. So turn clients like this down, but remember to be a professional about it. You always want to be the bigger person, even though it seems unfair.

There will be plenty promises of exposure, recommendations and possibilities of future paid work. Don’t bite.

The chances of you getting burned are too high. There’s a much better way of doing free work.

When Do You Choose To Work For Free?

Since so much depends on your situation, I can only speak to something we all experience:

The time when there’s no commercial work. Aka: downtime.

You probably have a (or a couple of) half-finished personal project collecting digital dust. All of them from “downtime” periods. Don’t get me wrong, doing personal projects is a great way to grow as an artist and it’s fun to try something new. But since this is a post about if you should do free work or not, I’m sure you are as frustrated as I was when clients aren’t waiting in line at your door.

So, what I suggest you to do (and what I did when starting out) is to delete your Scandinavian-apartment-DOF-test.max file and see if you can’t provide some actual value to someone.

I knew I could provide great value to a client if I had the chance, but no one was contacting me since they didn’t even know about me yet.

As a little side note, the reason client’s aren’t contacting you is probably this:

1. They have never heard of you
2. They don’t trust you
3. Your work isn’t good enough (yet).

All stuff for future post. Okay, let’s get back on track.

What To Do Then?

Open up your social media apps and maybe the local newspaper. Instagram, FB, Houzz, Behance, Linkedin, Twitter, anything where you follow (ideally) a local architect or whatever your target client would be.

Either you find a potential client you could really help out (maybe their current images suck) or you try and seek out someone you’d love to work for.

I’ll cover the first type in this post and save the other for later.

So, you’ve found someone who has some interesting projects, but their image material is really lacking. You know you could have done it so much better. If only they had come to you when they needed it…

If there’s enough material available, you should redo that project as your new personal project.

How would you approach this task if they had come to you? It might be a bit hard without knowing the brief, but just do your best. Try and dig up some more info about who this company is. What are their values, what type of projects do they normally do. Can you find any interviews with one of the founders or something like that. Go deep. It’s a great exercise none the less.

Take your time. Be thorough. Make the project great and fitting to their profile. Show a good understanding of their company and project. You need to present yourself as something they’ve been missing.

Document Your Process

While you are working, save a few work-in-progress images and references and write down some of your thoughts. As you are doing this you are gathering material and preparing content for the case study you will present them with.

Case study?! Yeah, a case study. You aren’t just going to send them an email with some images. When you’ve finished your project, you’ll have a good amount of content to quickly put into a pdf or you website (don’t make it public until that client gives the okay) for a great case study on this project.

Showing the client (and future potential clients) how you actually handled this project will build one of the most important things in client services: trust.

You’ve made a bunch of great looking images (or what ever the client needed improved) and your case study is ready. Now go ahead and prepare that email you’ve been longing to send for quite a while.

Sending The Work To The Client

Make sure you find at least two or three email adresses to decision makers in that company. Send it to the right guy or gal as main receiver and put the other one or two in CC – just in case the main one misses the email, is sick or something else. You want to make sure your hard work is noticed and that someone will pick up on it, but don’t be a douche and spam every one!

In the email you don’t start off by talking about yourself. Make it about them. We all love hearing great things about ourselves. Explain to them that you’ve come across their X project and you found it very interesting. Leave out that you think their images look like crap. As much as we love hearing great things about ourselves, we hate hearing negative things even more.

End the mail with something like: “Here is how I have approached your X project and this is the final result. I’m curious to know how you normally work with such a project and I would love to learn more about your process.”

That’s it. No sleazy sales talk. Just curiosity and great work. Be patient. People tend to be busy, but I’m sure they’ll get back to you eventually. You’ll definitely be on their radar and while you are waiting and happen to experience downtime, do it all over again with a new potential client.

This approach to free work will give you meaningful portfolio work that potential clients can connect with. While doing so, you get images to use on social media to build awareness about your work and you also end up with a great case study to build trust when people visit your website.

You will bring great value to (hopefully) thankful people and as you’ve proved to them you can do good work on exactly their type of project, you’ll be one of the first ones they think about when in need of your type of service.

This, as everything on the blog, is just my personal opinion and advice to people who is in the same situation I have been in and what worked for me. I’ll love to hear from you how this worked out for you, so don’t be shy and send me a message if you want

Render Node

Part I – “Affordable & Powerful”
Part II – “Network, 3ds Max & Backburner”
Part III – “Best Practices & Usage”

Now you got your very own render node set up and sending jobs to it like a maniac, I’ll share a few ways to get more out of it and some helpful reminders.

Organize your assets

Having a well organized library of assets to use in your scene is a fantastic thing to have. It’s not quick to get it all sorted and it’s hard to keep in order when client work takes over your schedule. It is however worth setting up and will be a huge timesaver down the road.

When I only had my workstation do the renders, everything was mostly scattered about on a large harddisk inside the workstation. I had begun to organize my assets (textures, models, maps etc.) in folders based on the name/company of the asset or where I had bought them.

This was a quick and simple way as that was how the files were delivered. When I needed to find an asset, I would struggle to try and remember the brand of a specific chair or in what package that nice tree was in. That’s no way to work efficiently and it’s so easy to just stick with this quick and dirty solution of finding the asset, curse at the time it took, and then do it again on the next project.

Here’s a folder structure example of what works best for me now:

Models (main folder)

• Exterior
  • Plants
    • Trees
      • Tree 01.max
      • Super Special Leaf Texture.jpg
    • Tree Maps
      • Basic Leaf Texture 01.jpg
      • Basic Leaf Texture 02.jpg

• Interior
  • Sofas
    • Vintage Sofas
      • Vintage Sofa 01
        • Vintage Sofa 01.max
        • Super Special Leather Texture 01.jpg
    • Fabric Maps
      • Basic Cotton 01.jpg
      • Basic Leather 01.jpg

You can keep making subfolders from here to eternity, but that’s no fun to browse through later on. So do it as you find reasonable.

Notice how I have my basic textures in a model category folder and then custom maps in the specific model’s folder.

Put basic textures in a “main folder” and model specific ones in the model’s folder.

There’s no need to have the same leather texture in every one of your model folders, neither do I recommend just linking to a specific model folder for them all to share. This can get really messy and hard to manage.

Connecter app

There’s quite a few plugins for 3ds max out there that can help you organize your assets. The free Connecter app by CG Connected is by far my favorite and the only one I use now.

Take a look at some of their quick tutorials, it’s really simple and works like a charm. It even allows you to keep your messy file structure of your asset library, but you might as well start to organize them a bit better. Who knows if they stop the development of the app and it won’t work with a future version of max. If that happens, you’ll still know how to find your stuff and get it ready for a new asset manager app.

Use Network Paths

As I mentioned in Part II it is crucial that your assets links to a location your node will be able to read from. I highly recommend network paths.

The problem you are facing now is that all of your assets links to somewhere local on your workstation or an external hard drive – same thing, the render node won’t be able to read them.

Since I haven’t found a way to batch relink all of my assets, I do it as I need them -please write me if you know about one and I’ll update this guide asap.

The Connecter app makes this really quick and easy to do. It allows you to drag ‘n drop your models from the app directly in to the 3ds max viewport. After merging the model into the scene, the app will prompt you to relocate the texture paths if they aren’t matching. If you are dragging in old models you have already mapped textures to locally, the app won’t prompt you. In this case you can just use the Relink Bitmaps plugin to remap the links through a network path (as explained in Part II).

To apply network paths to your new models, you need to browse for the location fairly close to the asset you are using.

Here I’ve browsed to my “…/models/interior” folder and the app managed to find the missing assets in a subfolder. Next time you drag in a model, you can simply click the history tab and then click “search”. I’ve tried to add the same path to the “Favorites” button, but for some reason this doesn’t seem to work. The app is still in the beta stage, so things might change.

The app does some work behind the scene and relinks the model you dragged in with it’s new paths. So the next time you drag that model in, the paths are remembered and will work with the render node. Pretty nice right?

Rendering your first job on the node

In case you missed it in the guide from Autodesk on how to use backburner, it’s crucial that you remember to specify where the render node should save the rendered image. If you forget this, the image is lost and you have to render again. So make this the first step when you set up the render job:

Remember to browse to the save location through the “Network” group and not “This PC” so you’ll get a network path – yeah I’m really trying to make you remember that you are now working via network.

Render passes and file formats

The same thing goes for your render passes. Save them to a network location (preferably the same as your normal image output. If you’re not feeling too fancy, I recommend 16- or 32bit tiffs as you get more image information (texture details and lighting) to play with later in Photoshop.

In Photoshop you can load them all at once by using the “Load Files into Stack” option. Like this:

I hate all these separate render passes lying around in folders, it’s a mess. So what I find really great is to save my render output in the .exr format. This will result in just a single .exr file that includes everything (the main image and all your render passes).

The only downside is that Photoshop can’t separate all those passes into layers unless you get the 50$ (It’s now free!) ProEXR plugin from fnord.  Update: There’s also a free plugin called Exr-IO this one seems a bit more user friendly, so I’ll personally try it out soon.

Distributed rendering

While it’s great to be able to send render jobs to the node and continue work on your workstation, there will be times where you’ll only have one big image to do or maybe an animation. This is where distributed rendering (DR) comes in handy.

Basically, the DR option of your render engine will use both/all your available machines to work on just one single image.

Speed up the start up

If you want to save a little money on your electrical bill, turn off the render node when you know you won’t be needing it for a period of time. Mine doesn’t run during the night unless it’s actually working on an image. That meant that every time I would turn it on, I had to log on through TeamViewer to launch the Backburner Server, Corona DR server etc.

You can make windows do that for you when the node starts up – also remove any password/login stuff on the node so you don’t have to type that in.

Its really simple to do: How to make a program run at startup on any computer – quick and easy guide from howtogeek.com

Now you can just power on the node, wait for it’s name to pop up in a TeamViewer notification or see it in the Backburner Manager on your workstation. You are now ready to start sending render jobs to it.

Keep an eye on the CPU temperature

During the many hours of work your node will heat up. The Xeons are build to operate well without damage at fairly high temperatures. Even though they are able to do this, I found it assuring to know that things weren’t overheating.

On the node you can install a very simpel program called HWMonitor. Launch this when you are rendering your first render job and make sure the temperatures doesn’t go above 85 degrees celsius (185F). If they do, there’s something wrong with your CPU cooler or airflow through the case. If they don’t, be happy and check them again when summer time arrives.

Happy rendering!

Render Node

Part I – “Affordable & Powerful”
Part II – “Network, 3ds Max & Backburner”
Part III – “Best Practices & Usage”

This is not a step-by-step guide as this is covered in great detail on many other sites. Instead I’ll gather the resources you need, link it here and add my own tips & tricks that most of the sites don’t mention.

Network Setup

Connection

Now you’ve got a render node sitting pretty over there in the corner, it’s time to get it up and running!

For this to work the best, you’ll need to connect your workstation and node to the same switch via ethernet cables. Getting a gigabit switch is advised for better transfer speeds. I went with a 8-port one from D-Link and it works great.

With everything connected and turned on, let’s get the two machines talking with each other.

What you need to do, is to create a Windows HomeGroup for your workstation and node to be a part of. This will allow your workstation to send data to your node and allow your node to access your workstation’s shared assets (mostly textures).

Creating a Windows HomeGroup Network

Mauro Huculak over at Windows Central has made a great guide on how to do this:

How to setup and manage windows 10 homegroup local network (opens in a new tab)

Once you’ve created your homegroup you can skip all the steps untill you get to “How to add computers to a HomeGroup”.

After that section continue to the next part: “How to share additional folders with your HomeGroup”.

Done.

Shareable Assets

Now that your HomeGroup is set up and you know how to share additional folders, you should see if you can access a shared workstation folder from your node. Try and transfer the 3ds Max installer to check speeds and accessibility.

If it doesn’t work as planned, hit up google with the error message you received or something simple like: “can’t access shared folder on HomeGroup”. I can’t cover them all here, so google is your best friend (as always).

When all is good, it’s time to start making your assets (3D models, textures, proxies etc.) accessible to the node. Make the folder where you keep your assets a shared folder on your HomeGroup and make sure you can access it from the node.

This is my shared assets folder setup.

(Will move everything to my NAS later)

There’s a few things that could go wrong when you send out your first render job to the node. Don’t worry, we’ll go through the big ones and you should be good to go soon.

Use Network Paths

When you send the job to the node, it reads the scene as it was on your workstation. I.e.: all the plugins you’ve used to create the scene, every proxy scattered and every single texture file probably points to somewhere local on your workstation’s drives.

If all your assets are on your D: drive the path for a texture would probably look like this: D:/Assets/Textures/Concrete/Concrete_Dark_01.jpg

This is a problem for the render node.

When it loads up the scene it expects to find that concrete texture image on the D-drive – but it doesn’t know that it’s the workstation’s D-drive.

With a path like that, it will look for it locally, but since there isn’t any D-drive in the node, it will fail to load it and you won’t see that beautiful concrete texture in your finished render.

What you need to do is to make sure that your scene assets are all mapped with a network path instead of a local path.

How a network path looks like in 3ds Max’s Asset Tracking (Shit+T)

Depending on how many assets you have, changing all of them one by one from their local path to the network path, will take ages. The whole point of the render node was to save time. I hope you’re not having second thoughts, I promise you all this work will be worth it in the end.

I haven’t yet found a way that can batch remap all of your assets. So what I did with old scenes was to use Colin Senner’s free Relink Bitmaps script – I’ll go in to detail on this script in a later post. For now a quick way to redo your scene’s assets’ paths, is to open up 3ds Max’s Asset Tracking (Shit+T), mark all the assets, right click and choose strip path.

Now start up Relink Bitmaps. Add a new “Saved path” by clicking the + icon and browse to your assets folder. It’s crucial that you find your folder through “Network” and not just through “This PC”. Its basically the same thing, but when you do it through the network path, the node will know where to look.

When you’ve added the network path to your assets, click the big “Relink” button and wait. Any missing textures will show up on the right and you might need to add more network folder paths for them to be found.

Installing The Software

3ds Max & Backburner

You won’t be needing a separate licens for 3ds Max. Just install it and close the window when it asks you to activate or use it as a trial and you are good to go. Later on when you are sending a render job to the node, max opens in a special mode and won’t trigger any activation prompt.

Backburner should install as standard when you run the 3ds Max installer, but check that you have it on both your workstation and node.

Render Engine

Installing your render engine depends entirely on the product you are using. I’m using the Corona Render engine. I get three (3) render node licenses included in the price. With Vray you need to pay a fixed amount per render node license. So add that to the node cost if Vray is your thing.

Check your installed 3ds Max version and tick the DR server option

Plugins

I’m a big fan of plugins, but for the node to understand the data you send it (a render job), you will also have to install the plugins on that node. Most plugins have an option to “install on render node, slave or DR” in the install menu, like the Corona screenshot above.

Remember to also copy the plugins you’ve installed without a typical .exe installer to your node. Look in your max root /plugins folder.

Extras

Instead of having an extra monitor, mouse and keyboard connected, I highly recommend handling your node via remote access. It’s nice being able to see what’s going on from the comfort of your workstation.

For this purpose I use a free program called TeamViewer. With this you can connect to the node via your workstation, laptop etc. and a window with the node’s desktop will pop up. From here you can control it as if you had your peripherals directly connected to it.

How To Setup Backburner:

Autodesk has a great article describing multiple scenarios here. Click on the “Basic Procedure 2″ to get straight to the steps you’ll need in this case.

What’s Next?

Alright, I’m sure you have a lot on your to-do list. It might take a day or two to get working, but I hope I’ve saved you some time and hassle with this post.

In part III you will learn some more basics, tips & tricks when using your render node.

Render Node

Part I – “Affordable & Powerful”
Part II – “Network, 3ds Max & Backburner”
Part III – “Best Practices & Usage”

What & When To Buy

It’s very easy to get caught in the ever improving hardware race. So think about why you want to invest in a render node and what you can actually afford.

If you can’t buy it without going in to debt, it probably means you don’t need it or are making poor business decisions (more on that some other time).

In my case I needed something to push work to when I had projects requiring multiple camera angles or different scenes. Having a render node would allow me to send a render job out and continue working on the next one immediately. It also freed up time to test stuff while getting to the next to-do item in the scene. No one likes waiting for a render to finish before they can continue to work.

As a bonus, the node is actually 2x as fast at rendering compared to my Intel i7 5820k workstation. Not bad considering the node was also cheaper.

The Hardware For This Build

As I’m writing this post, this type of CPU build is regarded as the best “bang-for-the-buck”.

It does require two Xeon CPUs and a special motherboard, so if you are on a really tight budget, I can highly recommend this guide by Dimitris over at pcfoo.com: “The -almost- $500 Rendering Node”. It is from 2013, but the principles does still very much apply.

Item List:

• Case: Fractal Design Node 605
  • I wanted a nice, subtle and small(ish) node that I wouldn’t mind having visible in the office. You can however go with any ATX form factor for this build. Just make sure to check there is enough clearance for the CPU coolers you get.
    
• Motherboard: ASUS Z9PA-D8
  • This motherboard was the cheapest I could find that had the ATX form factor. It also had onboard GPU so I didn’t need to get a separate one. Note that this type of motherboard uses the ECC ram type.
    
    
    
• CPUs: 2x Xeon E5 2670 2.6Ghz SR0kX
  • I bought all the hardware from “local” resellers. It was only the Xeons I had to get off of eBay. They are insanely cheap compared to the power you get. They’ve even gotten cheaper since I build my node. The reason seems to be that many big companies has swapped their servers for newer tech and the market is now flooded with these bad boys. Don’t worry about how they’ll hold up – they will.
    
    
    
• CPU Coolers: 2x Noctua NH-D9DX i4 3U
  • Expensive stuff, but the quality is awesome and my research indicated they would fit. You might be able to get something cheaper, but these ones I know fit and does a good job.
    
    
    
• Memory: 8x DDR3 1600 8GB Kingston ECC R 1,5V (KVR16R11D8/8HB) total of 64GB.
  • Just get the cheapest ones you can get hold of, but be sure to check that they will match the motherboard you get. Most brands has a list of compatibable memory on their website. Double check you get the right type: ECC vs Non-ECC. Ask the reseller if in doubt.
    
    
    
• PSU: EVGA Supernova G2 650W 80 Gold
  • The Xeons aren’t that power hungry and in this build there is no GPU that needs power. I chose this one as it had gotten great reviews, was fairly priced and had two 8-pin power cables needed for a dual CPU motherboard. The “Gold” certification helps a little on the power bill in the long run.
    
    
    
• Harddrive: 120gb Intel SSD.
  • Any SSD you can get your hands on. You only need Windows, 3ds max and plugins on it. All assets will be shared via network. You can even go with a standard harddrive, but why bother as SSDs are now so damn cheap, will last longer and are much faster.
    
• Extra Case Fan: Noctua 120 mm NF-S12A PWM
  • The Fractal case has two 120mm fans already mounted. One in each end. Oddly both were sat to take air in. I was a bit worried about heat from a dual Xeon setup in such a small case. Hence the extra case fan. I mounted the two Fractal fans in one side to take air in and the powerful Noctua fan on the opposite side to take the warm air out. Thereby creating a bit of a vacuum. 

Putting The Stuff Together

I won’t go in to details on how the hardware is put together. If you are completely new to this, I highly suggest that you get a friend who knows something about it to help you. Youtube is also a great place to see how it’s done:

This guy knows his stuff: How to build a computer in 30 minutes (youtube link)

Again, google and youtube is your friend.

Here’s a quick photo of my node when everything is connected.

I removed the harddrive bays to get better airflow – and yeah, the CPU coolers had me worried for a second, but they fit!

What’s Next?

If you happen to start the build and get to the windows installation, a good tip is to setup your login credentials to match the ones you have on your workstation. I.e. same username and password. It will make it easier later on.

General guide lines for setting up the network, 3ds max and backburner will be covered in part II next week. Sign up below to get notified the moment it goes live.

See you in part II!