If you want a printer, Canon offers good ones and most importantly the ink carts are cheap (never buy cheap printers, BTW!). Or go for a laser printer. Laser printers tend to make up for their cost quickly after you've printed a few university course scripts.
Merge their geo into your source scene and apply their texture to the original model. I'd look around at some scripts to see if there was anything to speed the process, maybe there is something that would load a batch into your scene and do everything for you. Or, you could just ask them not to be lame.
creationtwentytwo, did you ever pick up Modo? You could use the Constrain to Path and Duplicate script there's even a video tutorial on how to use it to make a bicycle chain. After that you could bake it down to a low poly model and animate the UVs/textures in engine.
It's out in just a couple more weeks :) some cool new vids at GT http://www.gametrailers.com/video/real-space-dead-space-2/709009 Is there some kinda trick to embeded video's? whenever I paste the Embed link I just get a wall of script
Back when I started, using CGAL, all animation was defined by writting scripts, controlling the rotation and translation through time. I have a higher maths grade than most programmers I meet, though. Good fr funky material effects and particle systems.
Nuke your prefs to kingdom come! :) You might consider doing this, just make sure you backup any scripts, shelves, etc. you want to keep. You could just rename the existing prefs folder and start Maya. Then copy from the old one.
Convert the normalmap to a curvature map using any tool you have access to (either using a Photoshop script, of something like good old Xnormal and Crazybump, or anything else really) and apply that as a displacement map to a subdvided copy of the low. It's a very dirty hack but it can work surpisingly well.
Not sure how you are going to get around that if it's based on a 32 bit hardware / os limitation. What's the issue with splitting up the mesh? If the border vertex weights match exactly, should be fine, no? You might be able to work on a single mesh and have a script split it up during export.
yeah they changed a lot of the script in the english version... a LOT of it. anywho, made a bunch of subtle changes to the face, both mesh and texture wise... i'm trying to stick more to the anime look, since that's how the character was originally envisioned. old on the left, new on the right.
Try using Nvidia Mipster instead. It installs alongside the dds plugin so you'll already have it. Check in file>scripts in Photoshop. It's a nice simple interface and often gives better results than the standard dds exporter, particularly with 1-bit alpha.