CompuServe Thread

Tom, I don't think too many of us have big rendering environments. And, unfortunately, we all wait for renderings. I have four machines that do nothing but 3D Studio work; one P75 with OS/2 Warp for modeling (I use OS/2 Warp because it allows me run 3DS in the background while using design programs in the foreground). The P75 does almost all the "leg" work (2D & 3D Modeling, Lofting, previewing, everything before rendering). The other machines are used for various other tasks (mainly AutoCAD), but are set up to do slave-renderings when I have to render. They are all DEC P60's with small hard drives (keeps purchase cost down) and decent graphics cards. They were about $2000.00 each; the P75 was about $4500 with all the RAM, the frame buffer, etc… With this setup, my rendering is done about 2.5 -3.5x faster (the P60's are a little slower than the P75); for example, it took my P75 366 hours to do 6300 frames alone. With the P60s running as well, it took about 110 hours (there was some interruption, but the time is pretty accurate.) The P60s have made me money; a client is much happier to get something before he/she expects it. I don't think any of us have a bunch of machines laying around waiting to do renderings (I wish!) A good friend of mine (who is my 3D Studio dealer) uses a P66 for most of his work and renders to it and to a SGI machine (he has a version of the 3D Studio renderer for SGI). With that configuration, he can crank out rendering at about the same speed I do. But my configuration, without software and VTR costs, was under $11,000. His configuration was about $17,000. For my use, the DECs work fine… And you can do lots of little things to speed up things; like faster video cards, EDO RAM, faster hard drives, 100MBps or Fiber network cable, etc… Every second you save adds up quickly (as you probably know). Hope this helps… -Brad

Tom I try to finish my animation in segments then render each segment over night. I try to storyboard things in 5-15 second cuts to make things more managable. Not always possible, but if you watch TV or movies there are seldom scenes longer that 15 seconds. Just more to think about<g> TedB -Ted Boardman !^NavFont01F0007MGHHGF0EF9A

<<Are project schedules set to accept 10 days x 24 hours x 2 Pentium 100mhz computers (thats what we have); or does everyone out there have 10 computers sitting around until it's rendering time??>> Depends on the budget. The last project needed 10 pentiums with 64M RAM running constantly for over two weeks to produce a five minute animation(left and right images for stereoscopy so you effectively have twice as many images to calculate). Only two or so were being used infrequently for the work since all the animators were freelance. You can get a pretty quick idea of what the rendering times and demands will be and then possibly rent some computers for the time. Once again it all depends on the budget. DaviD "the budget is not my buddy" GouID

We have 10 networked Pentium machines for the task, have also Hired extra machines for the couple of days when necessary. Also, you may be able to reduce you rendering time, by different modelling and texturing techniques, but yes, render times should be taken into account when rendering big jobs. 1 full minute is a sizable piece (Jurassic park was only about 8 mins 🙂 – Peter