3d modelling, motion tracking & VFX

DayDay

DayDay

DayDay

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Joined
24 Aug 2015
Posts
7
Hi everyone,

I would like some advice please

I'm a vfx artist who models & animates in 3DS Max & uses the 3d animation within live footage.

I use Photoshop for texturing, MatchMover to track 3D paths from the live footage, After Effects to composite & Premier to edit the final video.

Pretty much all my work has been at studio houses which had machines built to run the software. Now that I have graduated & on my own, I would like to build my own machine capable of letting me hone my craft.

I have a standard PC which was build for me, but nothing spectacular.

The advice I've recieved so far were to upgrade CPU & memory.

I was initially going to purchase the AMD-FX9590 but was recommended the Intel i7 & the web address to this forum.

As I am not too hot on hardware, I would appreciate any advice I can get.

Any suggestions welcome,

Thanks!

Dale.
 
Yes, you're right! To be honest, as I intend to do it professionally, I figured I would upgrade & improve it over time to get to the level that is required. I expect to pay a lot overall.

Because I am so unaware regarding hardware, I wouldn't know what would be a suitable budget.

If we base it on £500 to begin with, would that get the machine to a decent level? My rendering times at the moment are attrocious as you could imagine.
 
Depends what else you've got that you can re-use but with £500 I'd probably start with something like this - (mainly because it's almost the exact same as I've just bought and it copes with renders a lot better than my FX8320 did!)

YOUR BASKET
1 x Gigabyte Z97X-UD3H-BK - Devil's Canyon Core i7 4790K CPU & Motherboard Bundle **£20 Saving + Gigabyte Free Upgrade ** £359.98
1 x Kingston HyperX Beast 16GB (2x8GB) PC3-19200C11 2400MHz Dual Channel Kit (HX324C11T3K2/16) £79.99
Total : £439.97 (includes shipping : Ex.VAT).



An X99 system would be preferable but that'd annihilate the budget!

If you're using AE you'll want an Nvidia graphics card too.
 
Okay, great! I currently do have a Nvidia graphics card.

Out of curiosity, why would you recommend the i7 4790K? I was previously recommended the FX8350. As I have no idea what the differences are, I have no personal bias. You are the second person to recommend the i7 though, so there must be something Intel is providing that AMD isn't.

Would I need any sort of cooling system for the machine, or would that not be relevant?

Thanks so much for all your input.
 
DayDay said:
Okay, great! I currently do have a Nvidia graphics card.

Out of curiosity, why would you recommend the i7 4790K? I was previously recommended the FX8350. As I have no idea what the differences are, I have no personal bias. You are the second person to recommend the i7 though, so there must be something Intel is providing that AMD isn't.

Would I need any sort of cooling system for the machine, or would that not be relevant?

Thanks so much for all your input.
Click to expand...

If you're doing rendering work then the i7 is a lot faster. I switched from a 8320 to a 4790k last week and render times have reduced dramatically. The i7's are faster, more efficient, run cooler and have a better implemented instruction set (from what I gather AMD chips can do SSE 4.1/4.2 but they're useless at it and that makes a big difference in Premiere/AE).


Cooling wise if you want something better than standard but don't want to spend a fortune then this should do it -

YOUR BASKET
1 x Cooler Master Hyper 212 Evo CPU Cooler £29.99
Total : £29.99 (includes shipping : Ex.VAT).

 
Hi again!

I just noticed that Finance is available on the Overclock store!

Sorry to be a pain, but what would you recommend if I bumped my budget up to £1,000?
 
Maybe look at something like this -

YOUR BASKET
1 x Asus X99-S - Intel Core i7 5820K Six Core CPU & Motherboard Bundle ***£30 Saving*** £506.98
1 x TeamGroup Elite 16GB (4x4GB) DDR4 PC4-19200C16 2400MHz Quad Channel Kit - Black (TPKD416GM2400HC16QC01) £94.99
2 x Samsung 250GB 850 EVO SSD 2.5" SATA 6Gbps 32 Layer 3D V-NAND Solid State Drive (MZ-75E250B/EU) £85.99 (£171.98)
1 x Phanteks Enthoo Pro Mid Tower Case - Black £79.99
1 x EVGA Supernova G2 650W '80 Plus Gold' Modular Power Supply £74.99
1 x Corsair Hydro H60 V2 High Performance Liquid CPU Cooler (CW-9060007-WW) £66.95
2 x Seagate Barracuda 500GB 7200RPM SATA 6Gb/s 16MB Cache - OEM (ST500DM002) HDD £36.95 (£73.90)
Total : £1,069.78 (includes shipping : Ex.VAT).



You'll need to re-use your old graphics card or budget a bit more to drop a new one in but other than that it's good to go. If you're making use of CUDA enabled software (which you may well be doing with 3d rendering) then a decent Nvidia card would help - what have you got at the moment?

I'll explain the hard drives as well as no-one seems to understand why I spec them the way I do for these sort of builds :p

240GB SSD for the OS and programs, the 2nd SSD for your media cache and pagefile, 1 500GB drive for storing all your project media and the 2nd to output the finished renders to.

There's an absolute wealth of information on building media & rendering workstations here
 
Wow, I didn't realise how basic my setup was lol

At present, I have the GeForce GT 740 - is that suitable or would an upgrade be in order?
 
Depends how much you want to spend! Any of these would be fine, the more you spend the better the performance but it'll only help in certain parts of certain applications so it's worth checking which of your apps use CUDA/OPENGL/OPENCL etc so you can work out if the extra money will boost performance enough to warrant it

YOUR BASKET
1 x Palit GeForce GTX 970 4096MB GDDR5 PCI-Express Graphics Card £249.95
1 x KFA2 GeForce GTX 960 Reference 2048MB GDDR5 PCI-Express Graphics Card - OEM £146.99
1 x MSI GeForce GTX 950 OC 2048MB GDDR5 PCI-Express Graphics Card £118.99
Total : £515.93 (includes shipping : Ex.VAT).

 
If you bump that PSU up a little you could use your old gfx card and a new one at same time. Keeping the old slow card would let you use the 3dsmax iRay render on the new GPU and keep your desktop going on the old card.
If you have no interest in iRay you can skip it but it's an option.
 
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