I’ve been using Blender for 4 years now (I’m 17 currently). I’ve made some good artwork too. But, now I want to make an animation film, so I’ll be getting a new computer. So, that’s my dilemma: Should I get a High Specs Computer, a Workstation or a Normal PC with a Render Farm? My Budget is around $3,000-$3,500. I’m ready to extend my budget a bit more, but the system that I get should render VERY fast. Like not more than 2-3 minutes on a scene like this one (please note this scene has 1M polygons and took 1/2 hr to render on a Macbook):
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Hi, it depends on your needs and what render engine you use.
If you use Cycles and your scene fits into 6 GB VRAM take a Asus Z9PE-D8 WS and build a system around it.
You can use 4 Nvidia Titan with it or use 3 and extend with a Netstor box to get 7 Titan running.
Or use a cheaper card for display and add 3 Netstor boxes with 4 Titan each.
http://www.asus.com/Motherboards/Z9PED8_WS/#specifications
http://www.netstor.com.tw/_03/03_02.php?OTM=#
If you go for CPU rendering look here:
Cheers, mib.
EDIT: Try to render my benchmark file on your system, one Titan need ~58 seconds for it.
http://www.blenderartists.org/forum/showthread.php?303832-New-Cycles-Benchmark
Thanks for your reply mib2berlin! The thing is even I thought of building my own workstation, but blender cookie recently made a render farm walkthrough, of sorts. And they said it would be a lot faster, but I’m kinda confused on the render farm thing. And yes, I will mostly be using cycles. So should I go ahead with a workstation or a render farm? (Based on the budget and performance)
If you are just beginning to create the movie, and are doing it all by yourself, I would get a single powerful workstation for now. Something in the lines of what mib2berlin recommended, with 4xAMD and 2xTitans. It should be reasonably fast for you to see how your scenes look like while you work on them, and maybe do some rendering overnight. It will also be a lot faster than your macbook.
A render farm is usually helpful when you have all the movie data finished and you just need to render it. So when you get to that phase with your movie, you can decide whether you want to build a renderfarm or not.
Hi Spiderman, try to render my benchmark file i posted.
You can calculate exactly how much faster one Titan is compare to your macbook.
Like RenderStreet mention, buy a strong workstation like:
and add several Titan. Extend with a Netstor box if needed
For final rendering you can also pay a render service like raypump.com or similar.
Cheers, mib.
Computers that are good for gaming (realtime rendering) are generally the way to go. Also plenty of hard drive.
Personally, I’d say spend $5000 on a high end PC, and spend 3k on 10 render nodes for a render farm, giving each node 2x Titans and a decent CPU/RAM.
You should be able to get a discount if you buy all at once.
If you ABSOLUTELY sure (how it can be checked for every possible frame/ motion blur subframe in whole film w/o actual render? ) that it will fit in Titan GPU RAM (6GB IIRC), try to get multi GPU based box or farm. If on doubt, spend $$ to any multi CPU only variant that you like best fit (space, power consumption, blade server like or bunch of old MB all over room on woden shelfs, endles cobinations). Many boxes will make noise and heat.