3DS4 Workstation
Bob – You have a fair hardware setup for 2d CAD work, but if you are going
deeply into 3d, you're going to need more beef. Given your reference to paper
plans and ACAD plans, I am assuming that you will be preparing architectural
simulations.
The solution we like –
Massive rendering systems:
Modeling/rendering stations – Pentium 100, min. 32 Mb RAM, minimum 1+ Gb HD,
Matrox Impressions card w/4Mb RAM, minimum 17" monitor, DPS PAR + TBC IV +
RAZOR PRO (on one station only).
This station is networked to a series of rendering stations, which are fast
pentiums (min. 100 Mhz), with lots of RAM (64-128Mb), a minimum 500 Mb HD, and
a low-end VGA video card. To conserve space, these stations are rack mounted,
and share a single keyboard and monitor. Since they stations render to a file,
no advanced graphics cards are needed.
This type of configuration gets a lot of bang for your buck, you don't have
to buy all of it at one time (you can add to it station-by-station), and if any
one component goes down, you aren't SOL.
Dual pentiums are not yet a consideration, as 3dS and ACAD will not take full
advantage of their capabilities.
The DPS PAR card will compress your animations and play them back in
real-time, eliminating your need for a frame-accurate video tape deck (at least
for recording purposes). The TBC IV allows you to capture video from live
sources or a tape input through the PAR.When you need to do video editing, the
Razor Pro software will enable you to do effects and transitions between video
clips that have been captured to the hard drive using the PAR, and also
synchronise sound to your video.
The price differential between Pentiums and 486-100s has shrunken
significantly from where it once was, to the point where we really recommend
Pentiums to our clients that require processing power. Consider this – the
street price of a 100 Mhz Pentium mthrbd+CPU is only about $500 more than a
486-100, and you get approximately twice the number-crunching throughput.
We like the Matrox Impressions board for your type of application because of
the on-board rendering capability wih the 3d Dynaview software. Amoung other
things, this software does near-realtime rendering of your models within
AutoCAD. This gives you the ability to error-check your modeling quickly. Add
an inexpensive scan converter to your setup, and you could record walk-throughs
directly out to videotape for client approvals.
You're launching into a brave new world, and getting there is half the fun!