CompuServe Thread

A few answers to your questions. I run 3DS off of a 486-66 too. For still images it's fine, it may only take a few minutes (per frame), but for animating it's horrible. I have 16 megs of RAM, and that's fine too, to start out. As you get better and better at 3DS, you'll begin getting larger and larger files, and you'll need more and more. I'm going to upgrade to a pentium with 32 RAM in the near future. Best of luck, I hope you choose 3dstudio. – Neil 102226,3566

Greg, >> How do I find out if 3D Studio is my answer and if not where can I get >> info on other 3D modellers / animators. Well, since you asked this question in the 3D Studio forum, people will probably tell you that is exactly what you need! (g) 3D Studio is a great program, and will be moving to windowsNT later this year or early next. >> I understand 3D Studio needs a lot of Ram. Are we talking 16mg or >> 128mg?? Running 3D Studio (r.5) under windowsNT I would recommend 32MB at the very least. The more RAM you can afford, the better. Make sure your motherboard is not limited to a small amount of RAM. 256MB would probably be sufficient. If you use all of your RAM while rendering in 3D Studio, the program starts paging to the HD. This means slooooooooooooooowwwwwwwww rendering! >> I'm guessing a 17" + monitor is recoommended. 17" is probably fine. If you can get a good deal on a larger monitor, go ahead. >> What about for outputting to video. What sort of equip is needed there >> or is that a totaling different area?? Most guys on the forum here use the PAR. This is basically a card that you put in your system along with a dedicated Hard Drive. I believe the total cost is about $2,500. With the PAR I believe you can output to a consumer level SVHS deck with good results. There may be other solutions unveiled at SIGGRAPH this week. >> Will a processor such as a 486 DX2-66 suffice or do I need something >> faster… If you've already got the 486, go ahead and keep it. If you're buying new I would suggest a fast pentium. I'm guessing that you're not going to pay that much more for the pentium. No since in buying last years technology to use with next years software! Good luck! Bob W.

this is probably the wrong place to say this but at the risk of offending anybody also check out Lightwave (go Amigavendor / newtek section) these two (LW & 3DS) programms are both excellent but if price is apriority then you can get LW and an extra 32 megs of ram for the price of 3DS. sorry guys…. Stuart -skint but honest- Aitken

Out of interest you can do useful work with 3DS in just 8M of ram. A factory floor animation I did with this amount had 60K faces and 150 frames and rendered in about 12 hours (overnight!) on a 66M pentium. Ok if you don't mind leaving it running… john