Hardware selection for 3D animation rendering?
I had a few 3D animation students ask to use my dual core laptop and desktop to do some of their 3D animation rendering for their class. Thirty bucks to use my PCs for a day sounded good to me!
I was wondering about building an extra PC or 2 to be used for more of this work and advertising it to make some extra cash.
What specs are critical for a computer doing this type of work exclusively?
Dual core or preferably quad core CPU? Is CPU speed critical or will last year's good CPU be fine? For example, would there be a big performance gain going from a quad core 2.0 Ghz to a quad core 2.8 Ghz? Is L2/L3 cache memory something that would make a big difference?
A lot of RAM? The Newtek Lightwave 3D program on my desktop is only using 280 MB of RAM for its work right now.
Graphics card? I imagine a halfway decent card is needed to show their 3D work smoothly when it's done, but does it need to be a high end gaming GPU?
Operating system? Xp Home would be fine for this, while not using too many system resources for itself?
Give me more information on this and things to watch out for also.
I was wondering about building an extra PC or 2 to be used for more of this work and advertising it to make some extra cash.
What specs are critical for a computer doing this type of work exclusively?
Dual core or preferably quad core CPU? Is CPU speed critical or will last year's good CPU be fine? For example, would there be a big performance gain going from a quad core 2.0 Ghz to a quad core 2.8 Ghz? Is L2/L3 cache memory something that would make a big difference?
A lot of RAM? The Newtek Lightwave 3D program on my desktop is only using 280 MB of RAM for its work right now.
Graphics card? I imagine a halfway decent card is needed to show their 3D work smoothly when it's done, but does it need to be a high end gaming GPU?
Operating system? Xp Home would be fine for this, while not using too many system resources for itself?
Give me more information on this and things to watch out for also.
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Is the program multithreaded? If not, a quad would probably be a waste of money.
Only need quad core if the app is multithreaded, which you should be able to find out from the manufacturer of the app. Professional card is likely a good idea, to my knowledge rendering 3D animations is heavy on vram, and that's one of the defining differences between consumer and professional cards - professional cards come stacked with more vram. I imagine their rendering pathways are probably more optimized toward that sort of thing, too.
If the box is going to be used as a workstation then RAM and GPU are the most important component but CPU helps as well. I regularly see people max out 8GB of RAM doing particles, dynamics or rendering a dense scene of high resolution textures.
GPU is a tough one, the people I work for and a few of my friends always buy highend workstation Quadro's but I'd stay away from them. In the past three years I've seen nearly 30 Quardo FX 3500's go bad, so much for professional stability. In terms of performance they are good but you're paying a lot more for a relatively small increase in performance, I'd much rather buy a nice Geforce and upgrade it every six months and still come out spending less instead.
In terms of CPU it really depends on what you're doing, if you're rendering you're hitting the CPU exclusively (unless you're using a hardware renderer like gelato). Multithreading is an issue but I like to be doing rendering at the same time as other things so I'll fire off a render on one or more cores and work in another while it's running.
If this is a renderfarm machine then you don't need a fancy GPU (for software rendering) and you still want lots of RAM and CPU's to work. You can fire off a separate render in each core individually if you're renderer doesn't do multithreading but keep in mind that you're losing RAM with each instance.
Hope that helps, I'm sure Lynx will get in on this and provide his expertise in the area as well.
CPU and RAM. Simply. Your absolute minimum on RAM should be 4, but you'll certainly want more than that. Go for 8, or more. And high speed ram, too. Don't cheap out on the ram timings.
Actually, If you're building a rendering machine, don't cheap out and cut any corners with any cheaper components. Be prepared to sink a lot of money into this machine.
Unlike Chris, I have a few friends who have had great success with nVidia Quadro cards. Despite their systems also being used for 3D animation and rendering, they certainly don't see the daily use and stress that Chris' workstations do, so that could play a factor in the card's longevity. I like the Quadro cards, but don't have extensive experience using one with animating, so I can't give an experienced opinion.
Though if you're marketing this system to 3D artists in need of a rendering box, they very well could take you seriously only if you have serious pro hardware, i.e. Quadro/FireGL. The thing that matters to the artist is that the platform doesn't slow them down. When they're looking at a complex scene in the viewport and trying to keyframe an animation, low frame rate is a deal breaker. Also, many animators will playblast a scene (in maya) to check the shot framing and animation. I believe this is done on the GPU, but I'm not positive. Correct me if I'm wrong, Chris.
Also, don't overlook the harddrive. Put at least a 1tb drive in there, and perhaps even consider RAID. If someone is rendering out HD frames of a scene, that's going to eat up space REAL quick. Be prepared to deal with massive file sizes.
This project is going to be expensive. Real expensive. If, of course, you do it right. Beyond all the top end hardware we've dicussed, you've still got to invest in software, and 3D apps aren't cheap. (you ARE buying the software... right?) Honestly, if you build a rendering box, you're going to need quite a few clients to make the costs worthwhile. And I have to admit, I'm a bit skeptical about how hip 3D artists will be to the idea. I may be an exclusive case, but I know when I'm working on a project I'm VERY picky about file paths and organization, asset management, software customization and tweaking... I know if I didn't have a PC that could do these things, I'd only trust my work to a dedicated, consistent farm like what Chris manages. I couldn't imagine going to someone just to farm out their computer and walking away with the results. Perhaps that makes me crazy.
True, I hadn't thought about the marketability side of things. Also, you're correct on playblasting, if you're looking for these to be character animation or particles and dynamics scenes you probably don't want to skimp out here.
I so agree with this, though I'd go for four 250GB fast drives in RAID zero, especially if you'll be doing any compositing or editing on this. Once you start working with video this gets important really fast.
I'll agree to this, if you've got a few people who really like this idea then it may rock, especially if you're working with students or part time 3D guys who have easy access to your rig and don't have any other options.
He's right too about software, it can completely eclipse your hardware costs, if it's students you can get some really awesome deals on 3D software.
Hahahaha, awesome Thrax
haha, I know, I know!
Upon proofreading the post, I noticed that as well. Decided to keep it in, it made me smile.
I only use the laptop for playing videos while I play WoW on my main PC, so I wasn't worried about them messing up my stuff on the laptop.
My idea was to assemble the cheapest possible PC, with a quad core, 4 GB ram, and maybe a halfway decent gaming video card I might have laying around. Sounds like that might not be ideal.
Not in the least bit. If this idea is going to be taken seriously as a 'business', then that won't come close to cutting it.
http://www.rebusfarm.com/
http://www.respower.com/
http://www.renderrocket.com/
I found the following links for you.
Here is an open source rendering farm management software.
http://www.drqueue.org/
Here is a guy who built a home-made rendering farm
http://helmer.sfe.se/
If there are students at your town who are willing to rent computers from you, why don't you try to target their school as a customer? You can do a render farm starting from a small scale. I know from our university, it is very expensive for the universities to build and maintain computing systems. You can develop a business model attractive to both sides.
Not sure if they wrote it up themselves using Maya scripting or if it's commercial software; I can't remember what it's called of the top of my head.
Something around $100-$200 from ATI (4770, 4850, 4870, 4890) or Nvidia should be able to show their scenes smoothly shouldn't it?
When the students were doing their testing on my laptop, it played the scenes smoothly, and that's at 1280X800 resolution on a GeForce 7200 graphics chip.
It's like saying "Well a Cadillac was made to do driving as good as possible, right? Wouldn't it be a good choice for formula 1?"
That's far too complex a subject for an easy answer.
But the general answer is no. Gaming graphics cards will generally not pull the weight of 3D applications as well as a workstation card.
They're fined tuned to render in different means. Realtime as opposed to frame at a time.
I'm stopping here, to prevent the inevitable 'LWoT', or Lynx Wall-of-Text.
Tim, there is no hardware difference between the GPUs of FireGL and Radeon cards, same with Quadro. The difference is created by the manufacturer by assigning different hardware id numbers and matching with special graphics drivers for professional cards. The professional graphics drivers are optimized and certified for professional graphics software and do not perform as well with games. One can not simply install professional graphics drivers on the gaming cards since the drivers are locked with the hardware ids. At the link I gave above, there is some partial success converting the cards by modifying the hardware ids. I had done a similar mod for a FireGL years ago to use Patran and ABAQUS. But manufacturers naturally want to sell professional hardware at its special price category and try to prevent such conversions. I would not recommend modding. It is the safest bet to buy the real professional card. You can find used cards on Ebay. Especially in big corporations many of the professional graphics cards are wasted with just office work and find their way to Ebay through liquidators.
I doubt that the program I'm using, Virtools, will get much extra help, but it'd be worth a try. The point cloud I'm dealing with is butchering my laptop, and my desktop struggles a bit, too. The fancypants Quadros at the ACCAD lab do better, but they're also two generations newer and have a gig of RAM.
Crazy guy though, his dad wrote memtest86 and my friend even tried cryo-treating a few hardware components to push them harder. I think he did his CPU and his RAM, the result was a 1% increase in speed.