CompuServe Thread

Guy, The SGI Renderer was a waste of our time. I saw it at a dealer shop and realized that it would cost me over $10,000 for a computer that is only twice as fast as a Pentium. I can buy four machines for $10,000 and slave render to them, so the SGI stuff became a waste of money. I'm waiting for the Alpha version of 3D Studio.

Hi Guy, << ..I am looking into moving to SGI equipment and Alias Power Animator.. I would like some feedback on this move.. >> My only feedback is to possibly wait till SIGGRAPH before you spend your money and check out our booth. jonas[adesk]

Guy, >> Is anyone using the Studio 3d module on SGI yet? Any problems? << we're using at MetroLight Studios, and I must say, within certain constraints, it's incredible value for money. The constraints are you will need to work around the IPAS problem (can't use most IPAS routines) by possibly layering your scenes and compositing later. We've been able to do this. It probably wouldn't be cost-effective to buy new SGI systems for rendering – it really comes into play when you have an installed base of SGI render servers. We use it on a Challenger XL multiprocessor machine (8 processors) and get between 2 – 60 times faster per processor depending on RAM usage than a Pentium 100/128mb ram. The higher numbers are due to paging to disk on the Pentium 100. The Challenger has about 2gb of RAM which really helps on large scenes. Occasionally it bombs out inexplicably but otherwise it's pretty darned solid. 'Course it'll probably be obsolete when r5 comes out, but then so will most of your plug-ins/IPAS routines anyway. Martin