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

It really depends on how much animation your doing for your course... if its a design course then I don`t think you need to go as far as a renderfarm... on my rig below with a single core I can render a frame with about 10000 polys in under 10 seconds at 720x480, 3-4 lights, and raytracing and shadows enabled in Maya.

However if you must go all out (and possibly waste money) and start a renderfarm the render managment software I like the most is Smedge, its not the best but its very good for the price. I`d Highly recommend it.

When you have a job in the industry then you'll be able to afford a much better rig and renderfarm otherwise after you finish your course, if it were me I`d be thinking I could have saved some money and got a much better rig or renderfarm.

Alternatively... if your at crunch time you'll have acess to your university's render facilities or if you google for them there are online render services that can be veyr cheap (Much cheaper than using your own). Or I`m sure a couple of people here, myself included, might offer up a machine or several for rendering.
 
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I did a Games Computing degree a couple of years back, had to do a 30sec-1min animation on making an inanimate object come to life (think Luxo Junior). 25fps x 45 sec = 1125 frames, at an average of 2 mins a frame thats about 37.5 hours worth of rendering.

Just as a clarification I'm not suggesting that you go out and buy 4 more PCs, just that if you have a few machines on the network not doing anything then it would be silly not to use them ;)

IIRC, backburner was included with Max and was excellent - havent used any 3d apps since Uni so it'll have moved on a bit since then, no idea what the current situation is.
 
I agree with Lazymanc... but there is a whole world of difference between rendering for Design and rendering for Animation especially on a student budget.
 
I very much agree with the suggestion about render farms. I would even go so far as to suggest building a couple of cheapish pc's purely for rendering. The benefit of this is that you can carry on working at the same time as rendering. Ive had projects before where its been rendering solidly for 2-3 days and because of this, I couldn't do any other work which is really annoying just before deadlines.
 
Thanks for all the replies guys and the offer FunkyCowie, Im sure if i get stuck I might start a post asking for some rendering help or sumut, Would love to take you up on the offer.

If I do end up doing much rendering for my designs i'll post the images and let you chaps know if I need some help with some hardcore machines for any animation rendering.

Thank you very much everyone :)

Sol
 
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