Help!! Animation Computer Configuration

[elendil850]

I'm building a computer for my fiance, she is an animation student in college and uses Maya, Flash, and Photoshop and needs a faster system.

I am thinking about building a computer on the Intel i7 platform, but need some help picking components. I've built many computers for general use and for gaming, but never one designed for animation.

What components deserve attention concerning animation work? Does she need more memory, fast hard drives, a large cpu, powerful gpu, a mix of these, or all of the above!!

Help me out!

 

[jae]

cpu and ram. whats ur budget?

 

[Eureka]

I would think a good workstation GPU is also a must.

 

[elendil850]

I'm looking to spend around $1,500 no more than $2,000.

Her current computer has these specifications:
Core 2 Duo E6600
6 GB DDR2 800
250 GB SATA II Western Digital (windows and apps)
1 TB Western Digital Green (storage)
Nvidia 640MB GeForce 8800GTS
Windows Vista Ultimate 64bit

I'm thinking of building her a system similar to this:
Antec P183
Antec CP-850
Asus P6t SE
12 GB DDR3
2X Nvidia GeForce 260 896MB
Intel i7 920
2X WD Black 1TB (RAID 0)
Generic DVD Burner
Scythe Mugen Cooler.

 

[jae]

You sure a simple quad upgrade wouldnt be enough? thats not a bad system at all.

 

[Knavish]

Does Maya benefit from SLI'ed video cards? I thought it was more CPU dependent. I'd bet that Photoshop and Flash don't do anything with SLI at all...

 

[Modelworks]

I've worked with these application for over 10 years, here is what I spec as what a routine workstation would need.

Quad core cpu - rendering previews will benefit from this, sometimes particle systems are accelerated in viewports using multicores, depends on the application.

Fast video card with as much on board memory as possible. The reason for the memory is applications store textures for the viewports. Texture sizes in 3d apps are MUCH larger than game textures. Some are 16K x 16K @ 32bit because of alpha maps. If video memory is too low then when you rotate viewports the view will stop , cache textures, rotate, stop, and repeat as it swaps textures in and out. You can get a high end gaming card and it will work fine. The days of workstation specific cards is nearing an end. SLI is not used in any 3d application.

Ram - 4GB is fine for routine work, more the merrier.

Hard drive - speed not all that important. Rendering scenes is so slow that even the old 5400 rpm drives can keep up. More space is always nice. Raid is a waste of money unless working with uncompressed video, and you would need much more cpu power to do that, think 16 cores.

Display - nothing smaller than 22 inch will do here. Consider dual 22 inch screens over one large screen. Most applications are designed with dual screen support in mind where you can place menus and dialog on one screen and viewports on the other. Once you go dual with these applications you never will want to go back

Input - Wacom tablet. Even the cheap bamboo will be enough to get started. Really makes a difference in sculpting applications.

 

[elendil850]

Originally posted by: Modelworks
I've worked with these application for over 10 years, here is what I spec as what a routine workstation would need.

Quad core cpu - rendering previews will benefit from this, sometimes particle systems are accelerated in viewports using multicores, depends on the application.

Fast video card with as much on board memory as possible. The reason for the memory is applications store textures for the viewports. Texture sizes in 3d apps are MUCH larger than game textures. Some are 16K x 16K @ 32bit because of alpha maps. If video memory is too low then when you rotate viewports the view will stop , cache textures, rotate, stop, and repeat as it swaps textures in and out. You can get a high end gaming card and it will work fine. The days of workstation specific cards is nearing an end. SLI is not used in any 3d application.

Ram - 4GB is fine for routine work, more the merrier.

Hard drive - speed not all that important. Rendering scenes is so slow that even the old 5400 rpm drives can keep up. More space is always nice. Raid is a waste of money unless working with uncompressed video, and you would need much more cpu power to do that, think 16 cores.

Display - nothing smaller than 22 inch will do here. Consider dual 22 inch screens over one large screen. Most applications are designed with dual screen support in mind where you can place menus and dialog on one screen and viewports on the other. Once you go dual with these applications you never will want to go back

Input - Wacom tablet. Even the cheap bamboo will be enough to get started. Really makes a difference in sculpting applications.

Thanks for the input! I've never built a system for animation, only ones for general purpose and gaming.

 

[mmntech]

Originally posted by: jae
You sure a simple quad upgrade wouldnt be enough? thats not a bad system at all.

Definitely a quad core would help for any sort of media work. Most professional apps today are multithreaded. I know Photoshop is.

Does Maya benefit from SLI'ed video cards?

Safe to say probably not. She might be better off going with a more powerful card with a 1gb memory or more.

 

[elendil850]

Also, for her displays she is using a 20" 1680x1050 HP w2007 and a Wacom Cintiq 21UX

 

[cboath]

I just worked up a large animation that finished back in early february. I had 4 quad core xeon's to work with. Output was at 720p and final clip lasted about 15 minutes. Took those 4 machines nearly 4 weeks of continual rendering to knock it out.

I just bought myself an i7. Benches showing 30% improvements in rendering over their previous ships really caught my attention...

 

[elconejito]

CS4 photoshop does not support SLI.

To quote: "Photoshop CS4 takes advantage of only one GPU on your display card, even if more GPUs are present." I don't know how this affects dual-GPU cards though...

GPU and OpenGL Features and Limitation in Photoshop CS4

Adobe CS4 applications that support OpenGL features

The features are accelerated by OpenGL, not CUDA. So either ATI or Nvidia will work. I would think you're choice will be more influenced by the card's performance in Maya than in CS4.

 

[Modelworks]

Originally posted by: cboath
I just worked up a large animation that finished back in early february. I had 4 quad core xeon's to work with. Output was at 720p and final clip lasted about 15 minutes. Took those 4 machines nearly 4 weeks of continual rendering to knock it out.

I just bought myself an i7. Benches showing 30% improvements in rendering over their previous ships really caught my attention...

I gave up on having my own renderfarm and now just use commercial services. These guys are very good and not all that costly if you need it fast. That same render you did would only take them about 2 hours but it would cost $3-5k depending on complexity.
http://www.rebusfarm.com/

There are cheaper places that could knock it out in about a day for around $600

 

[elendil850]

Thanks for the help so far guys. It's been a real pain trying to learn about what components are of premier importance when building a computer primarily for animation!

 

[krnmastersgt]

If you get more than 4gb of ram you can use the excess for some Ramdisk scratchdisk for some epic response times :evil:

Other than that, its pretty much been said what you need.

 

[cboath]

Originally posted by: Modelworks

Originally posted by: cboath
I just worked up a large animation that finished back in early february. I had 4 quad core xeon's to work with. Output was at 720p and final clip lasted about 15 minutes. Took those 4 machines nearly 4 weeks of continual rendering to knock it out.

I just bought myself an i7. Benches showing 30% improvements in rendering over their previous ships really caught my attention...

I gave up on having my own renderfarm and now just use commercial services. These guys are very good and not all that costly if you need it fast. That same render you did would only take them about 2 hours but it would cost $3-5k depending on complexity.
http://www.rebusfarm.com/

There are cheaper places that could knock it out in about a day for around $600

There is that, true. However I mention it more for effect than anything else. Depending on what I was doing in the shot, frame times were 1-30 minutes. If you're working up an animation, and need to see rendered output - just as tests - whether they be 30 frames or 300 frames, the more juice in the processor the faster the tests will be done.

I'd love the render house option, but the company i did the project for wouldn't go for it at those prices. Can't imagine downloading the images either. Total was like 350GB in raw images. In my case, having I7's with 6+GB or ram likely would have been done in about 2 weeks. 2 weeks would be a key there, because I took 2 weeks off in there, too. It'd have been done when I got back...

To each his own, but in an animation setup, you need to consider what your working with:

Large files = more RAM
Larger files = the more juice you want in your GPU if you need it all shaded in the views and want nice smooth play back.
Animation = more CPU juice to render faster
Animation = larger HD to contain the source images

You typically blend the hardware to the type of work you're doing. For example, CPU is less necessary if you're just doing stills. 2 hours is long time for a single frame, but if you're doing a single frame only, it's not big deal.

 

[omprakash]

Hello friends,

We are making typical type of solutions in computer we have a fast computer which is 250 times faster then any fastest computer 240 TFP calculation per second to 960 TFP calculation per second you can do any type of rendring work which take 6 months in any fast computer my system do it in 2 days or some hours.
Apart from that we have some fast computer also which is lower then above solution.
Thanks
Omprakash Mudliyar
opmudliar@yahoo.com
9826449707

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[Winterpool]

Aaaah!

Though a 'fast computer which is 250 times faster than any fastest computer' sounds interesting (though a bit paradoxical).

 

[gsellis]

Originally posted by: omprakash
Hello friends,

We are making typical type of solutions in computer we have a fast computer which is 250 times faster then any fastest computer 240 TFP calculation per second to 960 TFP calculation per second you can do any type of rendring work which take 6 months in any fast computer my system do it in 2 days or some hours.
Apart from that we have some fast computer also which is lower then above solution.
Thanks
Omprakash Mudliyar
opmudliar@yahoo.com
9826449707

Michael, is that you?!?!