grantpd

I've been using zync for a while now but have grown frustrated at its inability to play nice with windows. Windows doesn't like to download its plugin, run its plugin, swears it is a piece of malicious software. I'm looking for a plug in solution to render the occasional set of stills, no animation. There are times when I have a lot of work to do + rendering jobs and it was nice to out put my ten or so takes to a bigger machine and get back renders in about an hour. This was usually on their ~96 core machines. Can anyone recommend a service for this type of work? I see a few advertised on this site, but I don't really know the pros and cons of what I'm seeing...

what about library files?

Is there a way to but plugins and layouts in one place (like a dropbox folder) so that I can use two machines and always have the setups be the same? I have a laptop I use for field work and am finding it cumbersome to copy the user prefs file back and forth between my two machines whenever I make a change.

Is there a way to either: automatically have the object manager scroll to the currently selected object OR bring up the tag information in the attribute manager of the selected object?

I'm playing around with prorender this week. While I'm excited by the real time aspect of this renderer, I'm disappointed by how grainy the textures all seem to come out. Is it just the case of needing to up the samples and filtering to a higher count (I'm previewing at 400 samples and 2x filtering)? It also is a bummer to not be able to get good brushed metal textures. Are there resources for pbr textures that work in c4d prorender?