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Workstations For Poor 3D-artists
Peter writes: "Ace's hardware has written an 'article for the creative people, who are searching to build or buy an affordable number cruncher to run their favorite workstation application. Maybe you already have an Athlon Thunderbird/XP and you are wondering if a dual Thunderbird/Athlon XP workstation might make sense for you. Or you might be interested in an affordable dual Athlon MP 1800+ workstation.' Included are benchmarks based on almost all available 3D-animation packages."
Life is about to get real interesting. The MPX chipsets - dual socket A support are rumored to hit the channel this week. While the tyan board had got a lot of positive press, I am really looking forward to having options from Abit, Asus, and a few others.
The original MP board needed a special power supply (due to the vid card specs) - but sounds like all the new boards will use a standard ATX PS. More important, there is a real good chance the price for the non-scsi variant might drop from ~200 to something closer to ~180 or 150 (hoping here...)
I know I have everything but the board, cpus, and heat sinks orded and waiting. Lets go!
+++ UGUCAUCGUAUUUCU
Where's Hash's Animation Master? This is an app that was written to be "3d for the masses" yet I don't see it highlighted in the article.
For shame - how could you look at animation for the low-end and not include A:M?
http://www.blender.nl
Try this 3D modelling and animation app. It's free, and remarkably full-featured. There are links on the site to some tutorials, as the UI is non-standard. To quickly see what can be done, browse the user gallery and webpages, also linked from the main page.
Martin Hash has a product called Animation Master. It's spline based and cheap. Find it here. It's got a little bit of a learning curve, but it's quite full featured and comes with a nice book. "We make software even an artist can afford." It's $299 for a new copy, and $99 for an upgrade. They release a new version about every year or two. They have versions for both Windows and Mac.
LOAD "SIG",8,1
LOADING...
READY.
RUN
Povray can work on 386. Blender can work on Pentium. Why could poor artist need (dual) Athlon for modelling? Poor drivers should consider buying Ferrari?
I love all that clever people who buy Pentium4 becouse they want to learn programming .
SoftImage took too long to rev from 3D to XSI. Then, when XSI finally arrived it had a very non-standard and unintuitive interface. Couple that with the fact that there was no polygonal modeller in XSI (they included a free copy of SI:3D with every XSI purchase so you could have polygonal tools) and you get a recipe for disaster.
SoftI was good at one point. It's been passed by both Maya and Max these days. SI has a lot of work to do to catch up.
What about cheap software for 3D artists?
They pirate it. Seriously. Blender is nice and all but the 3D artists (and wanna-be's) I've known generally would rather find ways to pirate the high-end stuff than use freeware.
Studios generally use big-name software packages. They want you to have experience in the software they use, such as 3DS, Maya, etc.
OtakuBooty.com: Smart, funny, sexy nerds.
Choices are getting slightly better with some free and/or inexpensive modeling tools.
The top of my list has to be Blender Creator which is a free (as in beer but not speech) and sports a very impressive features list.
OpenGL Renderer
Standard Polygon Primitive modeling (w/lattices etc)
Bez Curves
Nurbs
Multi texturing (up to 16 per object)
Texture UV Mapping
Environment Mapping
Bump Mapping
Spec Mapping
Catmull Clark Surfaces for nicely subdivding meshes
Bones and Armature system for character animation
Particle Effects
Global Illumination with radiosity capabilities
Super fast renderer
Very very low system requirements and compact size
Python Plugin Interface for extending Blender
Large and enthusiastic user base eager to answer questions
...and lots of other stuff I'm forgetting
speed bumps for Blender are as follows:
Absolutely bizarre (but incredibly efficient once you learn it) user interface
Limited import and export capabilities (import/export of DXF and VRML) although I hear that improving this area is their 'top priority' to fix
So if after trying a few of the tutorials you decide you like Blender do yourself a favor and pick up the Official Blender Guide. Chances are your local "mega mart type book store" has a copy and you'll save yourself tons of aggravation and time.
Course if you're just into mods for quake type games etc then you should try Milkshape ($20 last time I checked) but its windows only and I didn't particularly like the interface. One the bright side it can import/export just about any kind of format you can come up with.
Discreet has some freebie as well called Gmax which I've never tried mostly cos I despise 3DS' UI. Its supposedly a character designer / level editor for the mod community to play around with.
G. Washington on Government "it is force. Like fire, it is a dangerous servant and a fearful master."
My experience with Blender goes back only about a year or so, I don't know what it was like then. The interface actually is geared for speed. It took about a day or so before I had some idea where everything was. Now, I spend much more time modelling than pulling down menus (it has a really efficient hotkey + mouse combination). The rendering engine is scanline-based, not raytracing, but the results are pretty good. It also has the advantage of speed over a purely raytraced renderer. There are now plugins developed for export to external raytracing engines.
The "official" manual is $35, and two really helpful tutorial books are $20 each. I've never seen any manual for $199, though.
Recent improvements include a new "bones" animation system including weighted deformation values per vertex, C-C subdiv surfaces, and a python scripting interface for procedural modelling and animation.
It was nothing to do with affordable, cheap 3D workstations. It was about the latest and greatest x86 CPUs - and the latest and greatest, high-end software.
/. is a pretty sad statement about what has become of this once useful and interesting site.
There are better machines out there - SGI Indigo2s and Octanes with OpenGL (and more!) in the hardware, many decent Macs - all of which are more affordable 2nd hand than the wunderboxen on display here.
And if you're looking for a career in 3D animation/design, are you going to use some x86 toy, or would experience with what the rest of the industry uses be a bit more helpful in your career?
A vanishingly small amount of 3D work requires a fast CPU - it's about shoving large amounts of data around. It doesn't matter how many mhz your bus does - it's still a data bus, and it's inherently unsuited to this type of work.
Look at the Octane's Crossbar. Look at the O2s UMA architecture.
Apple continue to make the same mistake, and are going to cripple their G5 machines. Lovely fast processor, crap bus to the gfx, memory and disk.
And I just loved the way this compares the Shake results to a 4 year old Octane. Nice. I notice we don't see any playback information at high resolution - what's the point of fast render speeds if you can't *view* what you've just created?
Never mind that 4 year old Octane can be bought for a fraction of the price of the systems under discussion.
This was a truly laughable article that, while demostrating an understanding of consumer x86 toys, showed a clear lack of clue about 3D graphics needs.
That this article ever showed up on
I'm surprised we haven't see the Linux kiddies moaning about how the tests were run on Windows 2k.
fast cpu doesnt help it to be a fast workstation, without a pro graphics card, it is still a faster toy for animator.... but it could help rendering..........btw
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ My VAIO, My Style ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
A single P3, 512M RAM, with a GF2MX is plenty for running MAX or Maya fast enough for people not already employed by a high-end studio. You can model and animate to your heart's content, generating low-res, low-quality proofs as necessary. You don't *need* photorealistic, hi-res, 30fps proofs to get good work done. It's a luxury for the folks at Pixar.
Don't confuse the needs of an animator with those of final production rendering.
That's not quite correct. BMRT was used in the creation of A Bug's Life (and other movies), but it was not the sole program for for creating and rendering. Here's my little odyssey searching for info on this :)
... Toy Story (Classic and II), A Bug's Life.
... has been used on several productions, including A Bug's Life"
An abstract from a paper suggesting a connection between BMRT and Pixar's RenderMan standard:
BMRT: A Global Illumination Implementation of the RenderMan Standard
But then here is a disclaimer that BMRT is not associated with Pixar and is not a replacement for Renderman:
"BMRT uses some APIs that are very similar to those described in the published RenderMan Interface Specification. However, BMRT is not associated with Pixar, and no claims are made that BMRT is in any way a compatible replacement for RenderMan. Those who want a licensed implementaion of RenderMan should contact Pixar directly. Exluna.com Docs
But then got to the BMRT site, we find something which seems contradictory:
"BMRT is a ray tracer that we distribute free of charge. BMRT has been used in the production of several feature films, including A Bug's Life, Stuart Little, The Cell, Hollow Man, and Woman on Top."
BMRT FAQ
Finally, from the links section of the BMRT site:
"Pixar's RenderMan Toolkit (a.k.a. PhotoRealistic RenderMan, a.k.a. PRMan), now in release 3.9, is the oldest RenderMan implementation. PRMan has been used to render effects for
The Blue Moon Rendering Tools (BMRT) package
Links on Compatible Renderers
ShoutingMan.com
If you've got a Mac...
The Strata product is free. It has some disabled functions (for example: it only does single light sources), but it renders very nicely. POVRAY has a more difficult UI. RenderBoy is $25 shareware.
my old sig used to be funny, but then slashcode ate it and now it's not funny anymore