What should I go for in a 3D Rendering machine?

Solarius

Solarius

Solarius

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Hey guys,

Pretty soon i'll be starting an automotive design course in cov uni and i was wondering what sort of upgrades I should be doing to my comp to help with 3d rendering times.


Currently I now have what is in my sig but with an added 1gb of generic crap ram, So 4x512mb sticks.


With rendering machine's would you go for more ram or cpu or what? What would be best?


Any advice much appreciated.
Think if i went conroe if would help that much either?

Cheers, Sol :D
 
So its just ram thats the real key factor? Need to get some more, maybe 3-4gb in total then.
Cheers for the reply then mate, :)
 
Ram isn't a bad thing to have, but CPU really is king when it comes to rendering. Dual or even Quad core if you can get your hand on it is ideal. Don't worry too much about the GPU.
 
Solarius said:
Hey guys,

Pretty soon i'll be starting an automotive design course in cov uni and i was wondering what sort of upgrades I should be doing to my comp to help with 3d rendering times
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Hi,

probably worth speaking to the people who run the course and find out what software your gonna be using?

If it's multilthreaded then a dual-core would be handy! :)

Apart from what the others have said really (Ram etc) but maybe worth looking at some nice *input* tools i.e: graphics pad etc
 
Well, I know that they use Maya as the primary 3d design program. I would presume they are design for more than single core?

Yeah,I've been looking at graphics tablets but their so expensive for what they are :( . I think the best one to get would be an A4 one aswell, Usually over £100 tho arent they :(
 
I use Maya myself but for animation.

A Tablet would be very handy for design...

To be honest what you have is fine for your cpu needs. 2GBs of ram should see you through Uni. And you do need a good gfx card and preferably Nvidia because there has alway been a problem with Maya and ATI though that may have been rectified at some point, you'll need to read up about it as I`ve always been an Nvidia fanboy. Dual core would be good in a cpu. This is of course if you just using one computer to do you modelling and rendering.

Only if you go pro might you need more especially if your freelancing. As much ram as possible, fastest cpu on the block, possibly more than one computer.
 
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messiah khan said:
Ram isn't a bad thing to have, but CPU really is king when it comes to rendering. Dual or even Quad core if you can get your hand on it is ideal. Don't worry too much about the GPU.
Click to expand...

Problem with 3d rendering is if u have too little ram it will start paging and no matter how fast the processor is, its not going to help. I do however agree that processor speed is more important than gpu speed so about 2gb of ram and the best processor u can afford
 
a dual core would be handy coz at the end of projects youll be rushing to render images and use photoshop at the same time...iv been there, and its not fun with one core

afaik ram wise, 1 gig is fine for automotive uses. degree level anyway.

you want a fast processor....OCed C2D would be ideal.

as for graphics cards, i have a 6800gt and maya works fine. well, if i try fur or crazy stuff if dont like it, but for normal scenes its fine.

however, if your no bothered about games. i would suggest a supported cheap quadro, my mate put a 450 in his and it was flawless (think it was a 450, cost a couple of hundred iirc)
 
Awesome guys, Thanks very much for the help.

Hmmm, didnt know about the ATI problem, I'll look into it, cheers mate for the heads up :).

I think its most likely going to depend on if i can spare the cash to get either a design tablet and/or a Dual core cpu then. If a mentioned dual core would pull away with helping with rendering and say photoshopping at the same time I might have to look into this as no doubt from the sounds of it multitasking would be very helpful later in my course when im rushing.

Thanks a lot everyone, You've given me quite an insight.

Sol :D
 
Dont forget if you're rendering animation and you've got a spare old PC or two, these can be used as network rendering nodes, or you could try persuading any flatmates etc to spare some cpu cycles when not in use (overnight is good) providing they are networked.

Basically you install a rendering client on each spare machine, this sends a request to the rendering server (this can be your machine or another spare pc) for the next available frame, renders it, then sends it back to the server which marks it as complete and assigns the node a new frame. I know Max comes with a program called Backburner and I'd be suprised if Maya didn't have a similar utility.

Just remember to always render as seperate frames, preferably in a lossless format if you have the disk space, rather than straight to a video (you have to do this anyway if you use the network render). This is because if the render dies for some reason halfway through you will only loose the current frame and not the whole smegging video (absolute nightmare situation close to deadline).
 
I just remembered when I was taking my first animation class and cramming my final the night before last day... I had a Dell PIII 600mhz (This is like 7 years ago I think) and Maya 4... and a Geforce 2 MX possibly. I was rendering out animation frames whilst trying to work on the animation for the next scenes... I actually suceeded but it was hellish, everything pretty much ran as slow as.... as.... a slow thing. The machine I got for my next class was Dual AMD MP1900+ with 1GB ram it made things so much better. So on reflection Dual Core of some sort might be nice and then a tablet, then ram in that order depending on what you can afford ;)
 
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Hehehe. 600 Mhz.... Must have been painful....
I have done some rendering on a G5 mac (single core obviously) i was using in my final college year and even tho macs are supposed to be godly with memory management whilst trying to multitask it was dog slow.

I think without a doubt now I will look at Dual Cores then,might look into how much a cheap Conroe rig would cost me then, maybe one of those E6300's .Do Reckon those Allendale ones are ok instead of conroe?

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Also, I did have an idea about 'render farms' or sumut like that, I think that is what you were on about with multiple machines but i never realised just how to do it.

Didnt know you had a central server and then send requests to other machines, Sound very cool. Will look into it definately now you have mentioned it. Thank you :)

So with animation renders you would do seperate frames and then paste them all together in a movie creator program then?

Cheers, Sol :D
 
Solarius said:
So with animation renders you would do seperate frames and then paste them all together in a movie creator program then?
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Yes but all popular 3D progs strings them together for you when you render the scene anyway.

Dual Core and lots of RAM definately decreases rendering time, I was working on 3Ds Max during my 3D course and Max would crash frequently when I render a scene, so I doubled the RAM and it was fine.
 
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Solarius said:
Also, I did have an idea about 'render farms' or sumut like that, I think that is what you were on about with multiple machines but i never realised just how to do it.

Didnt know you had a central server and then send requests to other machines, Sound very cool. Will look into it definately now you have mentioned it. Thank you :)

So with animation renders you would do seperate frames and then paste them all together in a movie creator program then?

Cheers, Sol :D
Click to expand...

Yep, render farms is what I was on about. The server software can be run on any machine, but you can also run a client on same machine if you want to, because the server software is basically just a frame queue manager.

I remember having 12 pcs chugging away rendering frames close to the hand-in (large student house!), from a lowly P2 350Mhz to a P4 OC'd to 3.5ghz, every frame counts! :)

It's worth optimizing the scene for the renderer before you start, you can set some ridiculous levels of detail and end up with hours per frame if you're silly, but you can cut it down to minutes without too much of a notable loss.
 
Hehe, thanks for the advice mate. Might research into renders farm a bit. Learn a bit about em. What sort of 3D design/animation work did you do to require such an abundance of machines?

I take it you had to render a lengthy piece of animation?

Sol :)
 
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