alexisbosscher

I personnally have a gigabyte P35X v3 with gtx 980m 8gb of gpu ram and 16 gb of system ram. I use it since 3 years I think and I never had any problems. I work on it all the time as I love being able to work anywhere, I just have another desktop computer with 2 gtx 1080ti's for rendering batches of images. I would buy the same laptop today if I had to get a new one (but with updated specs of course) but I'm not sure they make that model anymore. Small and powerfull is possible. You just have to be ok with the fact that the times you render on your laptop, you will have a 'small hairdryer sound' that starts along with it. It ends almost immediately after I finish my render so it's ok for me but I know some people hate that. Personnally I use thearender with gpu rendering so I need the most ram I can get on the gtx. You could also look for one with thunderbolt that accepts an external gpu, that could be a way to go. Small and lightweight for on the go but possibility to hook up with more power. It really depends on your use and what softwares you want to use on it.

Nice results Collider, I especially like the 2nd video. You had a lot of crashes? seems strange I never had one, but maybe the scenes I tested where too small.

Nice comparison, like you said someone not in the viz field wouldn't see the difference (my girlfriend didn't) so this is promising. In this scene I think you can have even better results with even bigger lightmaps (especially for the walls) and less AO, so it could be even closer in quality. But still a very good comparison!

@ Guillaume: thanks for the nice comments, glad you liked it. Good luck with your project, seems promising already! Keep us posted on the progress I don't understand why viz studios would use Unity but not Unreal. What's the big difference? (I never used Unity)

Hi just wanted to share my experience with Ue4. Here is a small test I made a month ago Like you see it's a small scene but I think it can handle much bigger scenes then that. I'm preparing a bigger scene during my spare time to try UE4 on a real project. The workflow is very different but in the end It's not that difficult or time consuming to make a second UV-mapping per object. Also I think over time you will have more and more assets showing up with the 2d uv-mapping already done, I can really imagine evermotion (or others) releasing low-mid-poly models with 2uv-maps. If this realtime stuff takes off there will be a market for those models. As comparing Vray animation to Unreal: I think you don't see everything that's different with this workflow. In UE4 you have to prepare a 2d uv-map for every single object (this is time consuming) and then bake your lighting (time consuming) but once that's done you're all set: you can change every materials on the fly and make adjustments along the way. Imagine your client wants to change the color of the floor or wants to change something else. In Vray you need to re-render everything over and over again. For a big animation you can end up losing money on the job. If instead you use UE4 you have to prepare everything upfront and have proper uv-mapping (2 per object) but after this the difficult part is finished, you can just let your computer run the baking process once. After baking you can change every material like you want as many times as you want without having to rerender the scene. If you want to put some new assets in it or change / move something you will have to re-render you baking, but you won't have to uv-map again.

Or if your model is modelled in a certain way you could use the Sketchuv plugin: (at 10m36 you see it aplied on a road)