PC build for 3d modeling and animation

[alfabruce]

Yes, I am expecting my scenes to be vary large and very heavy in detail and textures. It may prove to be the case that Blende is simply not up to the job. Having said that, there are lots of amazing images produced with blender that would seem to be very detailed. I spose the onlyway to find out is to set up a scene and progressivly see how it goes as it gets more and more complex. As you point out, being clever with the simplicity of objects away from the camera will be the key and obviously a good deal of trial and error to work out a work flow where I can achieve a final result Im happy with in a reasonable time frame. If blender proves to be problematic Ill have to try some of the other products available but Im not in a position where I can spend many thousands on a high end program like Maya or Max att his stage.

What I do find interesting is the constatnly evolving nature of blender. Is may well be the case that soon the rendering process becomes far more efficient and productive.

Tim

 

[iNova]

You don't need to build a new one. Just replace your CPU with a i7-3770K OR Overclock your i5-3570K (but you will need to buy a cooler to replace the stock one if you go with Overclocking, if so, I recommend the Hyper 212 Evo, its the best cooler for the price IMO. Its cheap to, ALL vendors sell it for under $40

Edit: You're using Blender, in that case upgrade your Video Card to a 770 or 780 or 760 it will help you ALOT with Blender AND Gaming.

EDIT 2: If you want to go with AMD instead of Nvidia, get the 7870 or 7970.

 

[Draven35]

No, the case is not that Blender is up to the job, the case is that the scenes you are planning on doing are not very conducive to GPU-based rendering. The limitations i cited on Cycles are only for when it is running in GPU mode. Most really heavy animation scenes are going to exceed the memory for GPU rendering. It is also 'normal' for a scene to consume more memory in GPU than they do on the CPU because you have to add the GPU memory taken by the render engine itself, which is loaded onto the GPU at render time.

 

[alfabruce]

HI Inova,

yeah I will be using the newer i7 processor. Unfortunaltey the blender cycles engine does not work with the AMD type cards. SOmethigs to do with the cuda cores. THe 770 and 780 wouuld be great, the 780 i believe is basically a titan. THe 760 however is more like the 660 and the 600 series gtx cards for some reason use the keplar technology with which blender doesnt seem to work well.

Draven, I can always try rendering on the CPU with lots of ram but from what Ive read, its going to be a slow process.

Tim

 

[Draven35]

Rendering is slow. Even GPU rendering is slow. GPU rendering is not real time, and it is not done using the GPU's graphics engine, it is done using a separate program that runs on the CUDA cores in the GPU (or stream processors if you have am AMD GPU) . (And yes, I realize that technically, on Fermi and later NVIDIA GPUS, the 'graphics engine' is technically a separate program that runs on the CUDA cores...)

GPU rendering is *usually* faster, but not *always*. It is completely possible to make scenes that are slower or about the same render time on GPU as compared to CPU. It is possible to make renders that cant be done on the GPU because it doesn't support certain features... e.g. iray didn't have DoF and motion blur prior to Max 2013's release, Octane doesn't support motion blur and DoF in Lightwave, Cycles not supporting OSL 'shaders' (i.e. procedural textures) IBL being different in VRayRT than it is in VRay, etc.

This is why people still have rendernodes, buy time on render farms, etc.