Mac Mini?

Support Technical Support
1

Hello.

Has anyone here within this particular community ever used a Mac Mini for doing computation intense CGI?

Like, does Substance Painter 3D work (especially when designing 3 tiled 4k textures), and would it support scenes up to 10 million vertices at a time, or even computing complex cloth simulation?

My current machine survived its 5th annual de-dusting … and begs for oblivion

2

What are the specs?

Lots here use the Mac Mini for various tasks, but specs are important.

You might want to post here:

3

The specs read a bit mysterious (I am looking at them on the Apple website)

  • 16 GB of “unified” memory … whatever that means … I guess the CPU and GPU use that simultaneously
  • 16 core “neural” engine … also, a MacMini customer most certainly doesn’t know what that is. I know that I don’t

My biggest interest is to see whether users around here have used it and can confirm that it does at least what my rig does (the thing with 10 million vertices and 4k UDIM etc. )

4

I don’t use substance but I do use my Mini for almost all my animation work (Blender and Maya) and I use it exclusively for all my sim work (Houdini and Blender). It performs extremely well in all my use cases.

Likes Kays said there is a thread dedicated to using Blender with Macs and I know there are several users that work CGI with their Mini active there.

5

Have you not bought it yet?

I would highly consider the Mac Mini Pro if you can afford it. Amazon and B&H have been running some sales lately, so you can probably save yourself at least $100-200.

6

What setup are you running? Pro or basic

7

I’m running the original M1 - 16GB - 500 GB SSD

If you can afford it I would recommend getting the new M2 Pro Mini as it is a considerable upgrade comparably.