#Questions/ advice
5 messages in this thread
I've been asked to assemble a 3D Studio system for video animation. But is the
best hardware and software configuration? This appears to be the best place to
ask… so here I am. Any help or advice would be greatly appreciated.
There are a ton of questions. The basic ones being…
– What is a better chip to use – a 486 66mhz or 50 MHz? The 66mhz is
faster, but its motherboards bus speed is 33 mhz, whereas the 50 mhz bus speed
is 50 mhz.
– I been told that SCSI-2 is the best way to go as far as hard drives,
but should it be EISA or VESA?
– Is there a specific type of CD-ROM player to get, or is any make fine
to use with the 3D Studio CD library.
– Has 3D Studio been test with Windows NT? What kind of an ill effect
does Stacker or MS Double Space have on performance?
– Targa+ is the standard, but are the clones as compatible as they claim?
VIGA, being one as an example.
– I assume that the main monitor, used for animating and connected to the
fastest video card ( a VESA card?), should be a 17" or greater multi-sync, but
what about the output monitor that's connected to Targa? Since the aim of this
system is video animation, can the output monitor be a normal video monitor, or
does have to be something special.
– Are there any recommended co-proccessor boards? Something like a Yarc
(?) board?
– Are 16MB of RAM enough for complex animation, or should aim for 32, or
64, or even 128?
Maybe it would be easier to ask what is the best system that one could have to
run 3D studio and I'll work down from that.
Again, any help or suggestions would of tremendous help. I'm not familiar with
computer animation, but I'm excited by prospect and hope not misspend money or
"be penny smart and pound foolish."
Martin,
Ill help ya where I can.
-From what I understand, a 66mhz dx2 is faster for this stuff than a 50 mhz. I
guess the internal clock speed is more important than external (in this
comparison anyway) even though the math is done slower (33 mhz.) I personally
use a 486 dx50.
-I use stacker and have experienced no ill effects. The key is to leave a good
size (say 50 megs in your case) unstacked portion for "disk swaps."
-I don't know about "targa compatibles" but I do know I happen to have the real
thing (low low miles) and I'd probably sell it to ya for the price of a clone.
-I have 40 megs of ram and have used it and an additional hundred megs of swap
space on the hard drive for high rez still rendering (4000×3000). Since you are
talking about animations (pretty low res) you wont have the same problems I do
16 may do(help M. Foster.) The problem is that when you run out of memory (in
renderings) you swap to the disk. Once you swap to the disk, your rendering
time increases markedly (4 fold I think.)
Conventional 3ds wisdom is the more memory the merrier (sic, no dictionary).
-Some think the crappier the monitor the better because you never know what
your animation will be shown on (or maybe you do.) As I understand it, most
video monitors will do, as will a lot of vga monitors.
Any way, hope thats a help.
Regards Peter Kroko
Thanks for the advice.
—-I've been asked to assemble a 3D Studio system for video animation. But is
the best hardware and software configuration?
A DX2-66 works best in my opinion. Also spend all of your money on memory and
disk space. I would recommend a minimum of 40meg memory and 300+ disk space.
I run a Targa+ and I would recommend it. James
Thanks for advice. Seems that two people here, and others that I asked
verbally, all agree that a 66mHz is the way to go.