Good computer for 3d animation and visual effects

http://gizmodo.com/5407435/the-asus-g51j-3d-laptop-is-3d-done-right

Oh wait... you didn't want THAT kind of 3D?

 

There isn't really any specific desktop I can think of... ASUS is a fairly reliable brand, but I'd mostly look at the specs. If you want real speed, find a good desktop with an i7 processor and 4 to 8 GB RAM, a 500 GB 7200 rpm HD so there's enough space for your creations, and a high-pixel-density display so you can spot small details.

Of course, I don't really have any experience in the 3D animation area (yet), so others might have better suggestions than I.

 

iMac + Wacom Tablet + $$$$

 

I've heard that building your own computer is cheaper and better suites to your needs than pre made ones.

 

I actually found it's a little easier working in 3D with a mouse because you don't have a click wheel on the pen/touch. Plus, there are a lot of shortcuts that are easier on a key oar and mouse. Although for 2D a wacom is amazing.

I have like 3 computers to set up a small little render farm

 

personally I'd get an imac but I agree with kcur

 

Commodore 64.

 

1) Don't skimp on the display. It's the single most important thing for graphics work. Totally ignore all the sales crap about pixel response times, and focus on the viewing angle and color reproduction of the panel. If you can afford it, find an IPS, PVA or S-PVA panel, and steer clear of any that are based on TN technology. You may need to do a bit of research to find a good one, but supposedly Dell has some good models. HP 24" panels have gotten good reviews as well, but I can't recommend one personally after buying them to the office - the colors are totally over-saturated, and the panel lacks proper controls for adjusting them. Even using a Spyder Pro for calibrating the display left us with really unsatisfactory results.

2) For graphics, stick with Nvidia. Pretty much any graphics card for the past five years has sufficient performance to run Maya, Max etc. so you won't really see benefit from investing in a top-of-the line model. Even a low-end graphics card like Nvidia's 9400GT will run a 3D program and Photoshop just fine. To play it safe, anything upward from Nvidia's old 9600GT will not be a limiting factor for your learning. The reason I recommend Nvidia is that their drivers have always been more reliable for 3D programs than Intel's or Ati's, for reference, I've been using Maya since version 1.0

3) It's not a bad idea to make sure you've got sufficient RAM in your computer. Photoshop loves RAM, and 3D softwares can make use of it if you start rendering heavy scenes. You can get started with 2GB, 4GB is probably safe and not too expensive these days, 8GB gives you headroom but requires you to run a 64-bit OS.

4) A Wacom Intuos tablet is Photoshop's best friend. It's less relevant for 3D, but the programs do have some brush-based tools that are intuitive to use with a tablet.

5) Any modern CPU is fast enough. Pentium III at 1GHz was fast enough for modeling, animating and rendering nice animations. You'll probably get a decent AMD or Intel CPU anyway, and both provide ample performance for learning. If your renders take too long, you're simply doing them wrong


Finally, a word of warning... learning to do 3D on a computer that does anything you tell it to is risky, because you may learn bad habits and skip on the basics. If your renders are taking too long, it may actually be that you do not need a new computer at all, but instead need to re-examine your workflow.

A large part of 3D art is about learning to do things as lightly as possible - for example, making low-poly meshes that have only the needed polygons to articulate the shape, knowing you can always smooth the mesh and add a displacement map later. Jumping head-first into Z-brush or other detail-painting program can be roughly compared to climbing butt-first up a tree.

I don't know how much of my advice is redundant with regards to your current level of expertise, but here's hoping there's something useful in this post.

 

Sure you're not just a million polygons over the necessary amount?

 

Exactly my point: throwing CPU cycles at the problem when the issue is more about examining the workflow and the tools necessary to do the work.

I have never used yafaray, so I can't speak for its production-readiness or speed, but there are a number of things that can be a problem in this particular case. Perhaps you've gone overboard with your ray counts, ray bounces or sample amounts? Maybe you've set up too high anti-aliasing? Perhaps you've set your mesh subdivisions to something ridiculous that creates sub-pixel sized polygons? It really can be a number of things, and you don't learn how to do things right by solving the problem with a hardware upgrade. People have been doing incredible renders for the past 10+ years now, and they've always had to work within their hardware limitations.

Ultimately you don't even need to use global illumination techniques if your visual eye allows you to approximate the desired look with direct light sources.

To re-iterate, it's important to start from the basics and learn them well. There's no point in doing a million polygon scene and choking a renderer with super-high global illumination settings if you haven't yet accomplished a scene with only a thousand polygons that has a coordinated palette with balanced composition and framing.

As said, I don't know your level of expertise or artistic ability, so filter the advice however you see fit. But I do know that if your tools are too good, they compensate for a lot of mistakes that simply won't cut it once you start doing professional work and there is both a visual goal and a frame time budget