Need vs WANT - Time vs Money
Continuing on about meh tech talks.... What you really need to think about is what you NEED vs what you WANT... Now the needs and wants kinda relate to time and money... The computer+tech you have now is probably all you NEED to do what you want... do animation whatever BUT it might be so slow that it will take a lot of TIME... its like that good, fast, cheap triangle thanG... what screws up most new cg filmmakers is that they try to emulate big studios and they think they NEED the kind of heavy iron those companies use which costs a lot of MONEY... Now I'm going to say as of right now May 2010... the average PC around $1000 will be all you NEED to make a 3d film on your own... with $1000 today in the US you should get a quad core CPU with 8gb ram a nice gfx card and a 1-2tb hard drive... this $1099 PC on sale at Frys right now is actually better than the workstation I'm using right now... also you really WANT a 64 bit OS... I'm going to show whats possible with a consumer PC and a 64bit OS with HSM ^ ^ Its pretty CRAZY.... the amount of detail and the richness of it all you can manage to pull of with a decent rig and a 64 bit OS today... so again it will come back to peoples ideas....
But you might say... BUT M Dizzle you have that little render slave farm?! Yeh thats because I'm concerned with time so I spent more money so it will take less time... if you don't really care about time you can save the money and not buy any render slaves.... BUT if you built them yourself and were smart about it OR found some crazy sale you could get decent render slaves for $300-$700 apiece depending on if you chose AMD or Intel... for a render slave today May 2010 I'm gonna say you want again a quad core CPU with 8gb ram... smallest HD possible as all you need is the 64 bit OS and your client software... NO gfx card... the onboard gfx is fine or NO gfx at all if you plan to use VNC er whatever...
So MINUS monitors... extra hard drives... you could replicate the setup I'm making HSM with right now for about $3800 usd.... IF you wanna get fancier and have a dedicated render server+slave like I do add another $2000 cause I got an 8 core box for that.... but you don't NEED it...it was my old workstation whose mainboard couldn't give me the OGL performance I wanted so it became a server/slave... so that was an error on my part... there were some factors at that point I was unaware of but now I know so I'll do it cheaper next time...
I looked at my old setup compared to this one and the new one is like 8x faster and it was half the price of the old one....
So yeh its pretty exciting how fast/cheap stuff is now to make your own 3d animated films... I think almost EVERY gamer has the POWER to do it... so why aren't more people doing it? Waiting for Avatar like motion capture suits and pre-vix rigs? ^ ^
I think a lot of peeps have they NEEDS and WANTS mixed up.Brought to you by professional weirdo M dot Strange.