CompuServe Messages

<<…thanks very much for your detailed reply! A company offered me some modelling jobs. They would give me Sketch, but I would need to buy a Mac since I only have a PC. Would Sketch make sense on a 80 or even 66 mHz PPC?…>> Sure, I use Sketch on an 80 Mhz PowerMac myself. However, in addition to the basic spec 80Mhz PPC you might want the following… 1 – big screen, ie 20/21". 2 – 4Mb VRAM to allow 24 bit colour on that screen 3 – RAM. Loads of RAM. Obscenely H U G E amounts of RAM in fact 🙂 Points 2 and 3 will help you decide which model PowerMac to get. To be honest, if you're doing 3D modelling professionally, just get the biggest, fastest and most expandable PPC available and save yourself hassle down the road when you want bigger screens/more RAM. It's all tax deductible anyway, right ? I think that'd be something like a 8100/110 in a towercase. You'll get a fast PDS video card built in. It's an option on the 7100 series and unavailable on the 6100 series although other 3rd party NuBus video cards are available. Anyway, the PDS card has 2Mb of VRAM and it'll drive upto a 17" screen at 24 bits and it's easy to add 2Mb to get 4Mb total for the larger screens if you want them. To save some money you may well be able to use your PC screen with a Mac, it usually takes just the correct type of adaptor cable. No guarantees though – check with your dealers for compatibility. It's point 3 that's the real killer though, no matter what Mac you get. Sketch requires an absolute minimum of 14Mb RAM. That'll do you fine for construction of even very complex models. It's only when you start to render your models that the RAM requirements start to expand. Dramatically. I recently had a 32Mb Mac. I found I was routinely running with virtual memory turned on to give me an effective 64Mb even for just small test renders. I don't think having virtual memory on slowed down the rendering much, but constructing was a real drag – HD thrashing constantly, treacle like screen redraws, menu and palette selections etc. Oddly enough, the memory requirements for Phong rendering was the real killer. I found I could render the same scene using the Ray Tracing option in the 32Mb of real Ram. Of course it only took 5-10 times as long… I finally decided that this was getting ridiculous and bought more RAM for a total of 96Mb. everything now runs in RAM, the interface is nice and quick again and I've had no problems since. The point I'm getting at is that I'd suggest getting a Mac with as many RAM slots as you can. The 8100 series has 8 which need to be filled in pairs. There's 8Mb on the motherboard anyway. So you can start out with say 2 8Mb SIMMS, giving you a total of 24Mb. That's a real minimum RAM configuration for Sketch, but it would work. You'd have 6 slots left so when you needed more RAM you could simply buy another pair of 8Mb or 16Mb SIMMS and slot them in without having to mess around with swopping out your old ones. Repeat as nessecary until all slots are filled 🙂 >> David <<