Gnarly Cranium Posted May 22, 2004 Share Posted May 22, 2004 I am a freelance MAX artist. Most of my work has involved importing 3D AutoCAD or ADT models of individual log homes and running flyarounds of them. I just got hit with a 15-acre hospital complex, complete with landscaping, trees, grass, moving cars, reflective water, and a flying medical helicopter. Low-ish to middling detail. Due at the end of June. I have the assistance of a home designer proficient in AutoCAD and ADT, who is enlisted to provide me with the building models. The site plan alone is 34 megs as an AutoCAD dwg. The biggest I've ever worked with before was 10. A file that size took several hours to import into MAX on our fastest comp, and was impossible to work with before it was split up into sections. Our best comp, recently upgraded, is a Dual Pentium III 1ghz system with a GeForce FX5200 (yeah, the ones that act just like a GeForce 4. I had no input on the components, more's the pity) and 1gig of RAM. It can handle about a 600,000 poly scene before things start to get truly hairy and unworkable. This thing is going to choke on that big site plan. Badly. To say nothing of the scene when I get rolling on the 3D work. What new hardware/software should I get? I have to decide and order it pronto within the next few days, and I will need to get a loan to buy it. (has to be a loan, hospital beaureaucracy is such that the advance won't be coming in until about the same time that the project is due!) For software, I have to decide whether to go the extra mile to finally get MAX 6. Currently I am using 4.2. I have heard that 6 is much better at dealing with AutoCAD-type files, materials, and lighting... but I don't know if I can learn the new functions well enough in the time I've got to make proper use of them. I'm looking at Xfrog for the trees... but as far as I know that won't help me with grass. Grass is a thing of my nightmares, I don't know HOW I can do it without the polygon count shooting through the stratosphere. As for hardware-- Do I just get my current comp a proper video card, like the Quadro FX1100, and hope that'll be enough? I'll probably end up with rendering times that'll put my hair on end... even if I figure out network rendering to utilize the other three or four slower comps we've got. Do I get a whole new system? Probably. But from where?? Probably not Dell. I'm leaning towards Boxxtech, though price is definitely an issue. My budget will probably top out at about $3000. While I'm getting a loan, and plunking down the big bucks... I am wondering if I should give in to the temptation to nab a laptop. Alienware seems sufficiently powerful and upgradeable, but so far the customer service responses I've gotten to my questions haven't been encouraging. Boxxtech is apparently coming out with a laptop, but it doesn't seem to be anytime soon. (check that, it's out now-- but it's only got ATI graphics! bah) Whatever I choose, I'm going to be stuck with it for a good long while-- $3000 is a lot of money for me, and I've never bought a new computer before. I'm an artist, not a hardware jockey... I'm out of my depth here. I have to do this while I'm also finishing up spring term at school-- I'm taking 15 credit hours, and finals are just a couple weeks before the project is due. If the architect gets us the files we need fast enough, and if I make the right decisions here, I CAN do this.... but all the same... Panic is setting in. Any advice? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
radioVOY Posted May 22, 2004 Share Posted May 22, 2004 men such a big job!! but first dont get panic. the first thing that you need to get clear is what your client is requesting from you, animation, render, 360 views? whatever it is can be too big to deal with, if its animation maybe you need an exterior (facade) and interior walk, so trace the paths for you camera and erase all that you are not able to see and take just the volumes that you need to see, brake the hole movie in cameras and each camera in diferent file. actually im working with a 2 miles greenpark in one shot is big but i can deal with. optimize all, in some cases dont make filelink. may be its a 2 million square feets project but if you only need to see the facade just need 300 sq. feet of that front. a big step is to get a new systemif the budget is short i recomend that you build the system: a dual xeon procesor with 1 gb of ram and nvidia quadro fx1100 card and everything else is around the 2k. good luck and if you start lossing some hair, well share work. best regards!! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
bobmaxer Posted May 22, 2004 Share Posted May 22, 2004 u need a minimum of 3gb ram, 256 or 512 mb Nvidia, or ATI or Wild CAT card, render all your people, cars, trees separately as TGAs, and then you can composite them in adobe premiere using alpha, good luck Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
STRAT Posted May 22, 2004 Share Posted May 22, 2004 u need a minimum of 3gb ram, 256 or 512 mb Nvidia, or ATI or Wild CAT card, render all your people, cars, trees separately as TGAs, and then you can composite them in adobe premiere using alpha, good luck eh??? i deal with acad/max importing with cad models waaaaay in advance of 34 mb and i've got only 1 gig of ram, which is fine. (obviously more the better) and why a fast hi spec card?? total waste of money. a hi spec card wont speed up render times, and as for screen update times? neglegable. software - yup, get in max 6. this really does interface with acad much nicerer. it sounds fairly mid-low detailed model as you say, so for trees i'd use opacity mapping and just flat mapping for grass. clever use of this can fool the viewer into anything. 3d trees will cripple you and your processor. personally i switched from max to c4d a couple years ago and found a huuuuuuge leap in processing time and model handling. max is so slow and cumbersome compaired. hardware - i agree with radioVOY. get in a xeon or 2. i recently bought 2 IBM intellistation xeons with a gig of ram each and they fly through scenes like you mentioned like a hot knife through butter. as i say, i regulaly do huge archi schemes a fair size bigger than this and my general advice is buy in fast processors. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Gnarly Cranium Posted May 22, 2004 Author Share Posted May 22, 2004 Ahhh great info guys! Guess I should've been more specific-- it's to be a flyaround, showing an overview of most of the complex with some segments highlighting certain buildings. All exterior only. No people. Screen update times are a big issue-- currently my big scenes are impossible to even WORK on if half the geometry isn't hidden, and even then it's tough. I've no experience with the better cards. (Heck, -my- computer has a TNT2 Vanta. *twitch*) Would a mid-level GeForce FX be enough for me to deal with this stuff or do I go for a lower Quadro? I don't know where the benefit starts to taper off... hmm. I've never gotten opacity-mapped trees or flat grass to look remotely OK, I quite lack the cleverness you mention... Xfrog has a function that can turn the polygon count way up and down for different levels of detail for use at different distances, I thought that might be manageable, although it would still be a MUCH higher total polycount than mapped trees. I'll get max 6 if I can swing it... but I am still wondering about that one. Left to my own devices I'd get and learn C4D, but I certainly haven't the time for that on this project. I'm not sure if upgrading to max 6 is worth it or if I should just switch apps this summer. But that's another issue. This 'hot knife/butter' idea intruiges and taunts me... I will see about getting a new comp built by a friend if I can, much much cheaper than buying a whole system prebuilt, but the trouble is this friend lives in another state, and can't directly help me if something goes wrong. I've got nobody around who can help me get it to work, and I don't have the time to troubleshoot/wrestle it myself. Will have to see how this works out. How about AMD boards? I really prefer to avoid Intel if I can... but I sure don't know a darn thing about the new 64-bit chips, or how AMD measures up. as i say, i regulaly do huge archi schemes a fair size bigger than this and my general advice is buy in fast processors. And this is why asking about it here is cool, heheh! I live in a fairly small town, I only know one other max artist here and he mostly knows video post stuff, not architectural work. So nice to hear from folks who do this stuff! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
quizzy Posted May 22, 2004 Share Posted May 22, 2004 So what I understand is that the ACAD guy models in 3D? If so, be sure that he model polygin friendly. I had a little project the other day which was moddeled by an acad guy. Example: 2 objects in acad where allmost 250.000 polygons, when I re-modeled them in MAX they where about 7.000 poly's. Another thing why the poly-count should be as low as possible is that MAX will not render raytraced-material (like your water) scenes larger than 2 million polygons. Raytrace depth should be at 3!!! (default is 9 which is way too much) I've rendered an animation of a scene with 1 million polygons , massive RPC usage, raytraced materials, raytraced sun-light, 9 shadow mapped lights, 18 lights, plane-trees, etc etc... and an average frame took about 10 minutes to render on my slowest machine which is a P4 1,7 with 768MB RAM. Next to this slow machine I had 2 much faster machine to render along, and it took about two weeks to render 2 animations. Right click and save: http://www2.utrecht.nl/images/OGU/pos/clips/muziekpaleis_beganegrond.avi http://www2.utrecht.nl/images/OGU/pos/clips/Muziekpaleis_vogelvlucht.avi You need DivX.... I guess you will be needing a lot more processing power next to what you have.... An answer to your question: Get yourself a nice P4 3.2 with Hyperthreading Put 2 GB RAM in it. Get yourself a nice fast graphic card to avoid endless waiting when your screen rebuilds. I would suggest a NVIDIA 6 series with at least 256MB RAM. Your video memory will be used for the geometry as well as your textures you'll see in the viewports. Now this is your workstation.... Now for your render node: P4 3.2 or 3.0 (its a price descision) 1 GB RAM Video card??? THE CHEAPEST YOU'LL FIND!! Together with your dual P3 this will make a fine renderfarm... I would never go for Xfrog trees if you need more than 50 in your scene. RPC has some nice trees and are very cost effective. Or use any other plane method. For grass I would go with a texture and convince the client that it is much better!! Hope this info was a little helpfull.... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
STRAT Posted May 22, 2004 Share Posted May 22, 2004 64 bit machines will certainly be faster, but 3d apps aint yet optomised for the system, so i doubt weather the extra cost is worth the justification. heck, there isnt even yet a 64 bit windows i used to use amd boards myself, but i find intel allot better at coping with large floating point calcs where over heating is concerned. my amd's were always overheating in max and crashing. with my xeons this isn't an issue. altho i dont think you can custom build xeons yet. :? take a look at this thread and this chap's work, perhaps he can advise too, as he's seemed to make a success of things - http://www.cgarchitect.com/vb/showthread.php?t=5762 and look at his trees - opacity mapped. but as mentioned, rpc is certainly another way to do it. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Gnarly Cranium Posted May 22, 2004 Author Share Posted May 22, 2004 So what I understand is that the ACAD guy models in 3D? If so, be sure that he model polygin friendly. I had a little project the other day which was moddeled by an acad guy. Example: 2 objects in acad where allmost 250.000 polygons, when I re-modeled them in MAX they where about 7.000 poly's. I don't know HOW to tell him to model polygon-friendly! I don't know ACAD well enough to know what comes out alright and what doesn't, and he barely understands how it comes out to MAX. I do indeed have to rebuild things pretty darn often-- especially roofs and logs, those are hopeless. Triangles everywhere, duplicate faces... oh, nightmares. At least the buildings are supposed to be fairly basic, that ought to keep things more under control... I hope. Another thing why the poly-count should be as low as possible is that MAX will not render raytraced-material (like your water) scenes larger than 2 million polygons. Raytrace depth should be at 3!!! (default is 9 which is way too much) I sure hope the total isn't that big... gah ouch ouch... maybe I should just cut the raytracing out completely, if I want to get this thing done this year! Thanks for warning me about the depth number, that'll come in handy for other projects even if not this one! Get yourself a nice fast graphic card to avoid endless waiting when your screen rebuilds. .... Video card??? THE CHEAPEST YOU'LL FIND!! Meaning graphics card and video card are separate things? I was under the impression they were one in the same. Hard to do 'cheapest' and 'nice and fast' at the same time, heh. I don't know if I can afford more than one machine... one is pushing it. The hardware alone on this project is going to cost about as much as my whole cut-- but at least I'll have a new comp! I would never go for Xfrog trees if you need more than 50 in your scene. RPC has some nice trees and are very cost effective. Or use any other plane method. For grass I would go with a texture and convince the client that it is much better!! Hope this info was a little helpfull.... VERY helpful! Quizzy to my rescue! I'm not sure how many trees there'll be... but it's almost certainly a lot more than 50, so I'll have to check out the other methods... wish I knew how to get plane trees to not look like crud. Nice thing about this project is that the hospital is the one in the city where I live-- I can see it from my house actually, just a quick drive down the street and I can roam around there, like if I want to see how many trees. We'll be taking photos for textures and whatnot next week I think-- we're not sure how to do the background, since there's a huge construction crane in the way of any panoramas, which will need to be painted out. The hospital people told the guy who's producing the DVD the material will be on that he could take a ride up in the helicopter to take pics!! -- but I don't think that would actually do much good, heheh. 64 bit machines will certainly be faster, but 3d apps aint yet optomised for the system, so i doubt weather the extra cost is worth the justification. heck, there isnt even yet a 64 bit windows That's about what I thought! Heh so a no on that! Still more questions than before-- but I've definitely got more of a direction here! Phew! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
kris Posted May 22, 2004 Share Posted May 22, 2004 I have same situation like you these days so I posted thread: test your rendering speed on this forum. Check it out. I have purchased two new PC yesterday. each system is ; dual Athlon 2800+ 1 GB ram 80 GB hard, 7200 rpm with 8m cache dual motherboard quality case geforce 5900FX Ultra ( wich can be moded in quadro, check http://www.guru3d.com for information). one switcher for 4 PC so you can have one monitor on four of your machines gigabit ethernet card hub or switcher for gigabit network The price for these two machines was 3300$ in Croatia so it is cheeper in EU or USA. Check forum test for resoults and youll see it is very fast and cheap sollution for you. I think that one system with dual Xeon cost more money than these two PC and they are equally fast. Maybe you'll need 512 MB extra RAM on each of your machines to do your project, and try to reduce poligons in your scene. You'll have some remodeling before you start to render it. I hope I helped you. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
quizzy Posted May 23, 2004 Share Posted May 23, 2004 video card = graphic card... (at least I think so) And the cheap graphic card is for your render slave not your workstation... I was talking about 2 comps.... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Gnarly Cranium Posted May 23, 2004 Author Share Posted May 23, 2004 I think that one system with dual Xeon cost more money than these two PC and they are equally fast. Am not sure how well I can compare this stuff to make a good decision on it, but I'll look into it. video card = graphic card... (at least I think so) And the cheap graphic card is for your render slave not your workstation... I was talking about 2 comps.... Ahhh right gotcha! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
mbr Posted May 23, 2004 Share Posted May 23, 2004 Personally, I'd forget about Max 6 or XFrog. It's already been stated why not to get XFrog - their models really rock, but even if the poly count is lower, one tree will still be more than a forest of RPCs or mapped (look at marlin's setups). I'd go for the RPCs - premade, so it's quick, and you can focus on the look and optimizing (like rendering groups of trees, then mapping them on a plane, for fillers and far off). I'd put the money into a new machine, a Dell. Forget Boxxtech for now, their prices are too high considering you have little to work with. Buy a Dell refurbished (http://www.delloutlet.com). You can have a 'new' workstation to your door in 24 hours. I'd also not worry about the graphics card. It's nice, but a mid level one, either a geforce or quadro will be fine (and I believe Dell's workstations only come with prof cards - ATIs or Quadros, both would be fine). So, one more time, imho, I'd put ALL the money into the processors and ram (and RPCs). That will make the difference in the end. For cheap cars, if you need some, look at http://www.cgdatabank.com . I've bought a bunch there, and they are accurate and really nice (although the interiors are minimal, which is great for us, almost 'low' poly but 'real'). Only thing is that some of them are European models. Still nice, and I love the 350z and the old RX7! Good luck. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Alfonso Lee Posted May 24, 2004 Share Posted May 24, 2004 I don't know HOW to tell him to model polygon-friendly! I don't know ACAD well enough to know what comes out alright and what doesn't, and he barely understands how it comes out to MAX. I do indeed have to rebuild things pretty darn often-- especially roofs and logs, those are hopeless. Triangles everywhere, duplicate faces... oh, nightmares. At least the buildings are supposed to be fairly basic, that ought to keep things more under control... I hope. Two conditions to the ACAD guy: 1. use only 3dface and thickness, NO solid modelling since they're likely to cause trouble. 2. all 3d on their respective layer and export ONLY those layers. The idea is to avoid any complication caused by solid modelling by making use of basic ACAD primitives. Hope that helps. Alfonso Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
tcorbett Posted May 24, 2004 Share Posted May 24, 2004 I have to agree with MBR, especially on the RPC trees over XFrog (even with XTune). Don't get me wrong, it is a great program and great for close-ups, but with the size & scope of the site that you have described, you may want to just go quick. On the other hand, if you will be doing any fly-overs, go for XFrog, as RPCs look bad when viewed above a certain angle. For the cars, though, I recommend picking up the RPC Parking Lot package, even if you are not doing a parking lot, As long as you are not directly next to the vehicle, the cars look good. Finally, as for rendering, get a bunch of older machines and network render the heck out of that monster. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
STRAT Posted May 24, 2004 Share Posted May 24, 2004 Two conditions to the ACAD guy: 1. use only 3dface and thickness, NO solid modelling since they're likely to cause trouble. 2. all 3d on their respective layer and export ONLY those layers. The idea is to avoid any complication caused by solid modelling by making use of basic ACAD primitives. Hope that helps. Alfonso i absolutely agree. solids could really mess you up here. especially if you aren't familier with it. also, for my lowpoly 3d stuff i go here - http://www.lowpolygon3d.com/cgi-bin/cp-app.cgi Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
serpico Posted May 24, 2004 Share Posted May 24, 2004 As a beginner here and new member, reading this post alone I've learned so much! You guys are great, I'm looking forward to reading more of the forums. I was referred here by another member/visitor to cgarchitect. I'm glad I checked it out. Doing some investigating on xfrog, I see that it's only available for c4d and not 3ds max6. What is the alternative? I had problems inserting trees in AutoCAD, the filesize got so big that I had to delete most of the trees. I just completed a project for a client that is planning to build a new site at the local international airport and it was a great challenge. Wish I had the experience and knowledge of this sites' members before I completed. Next time... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
skana Posted May 25, 2004 Share Posted May 25, 2004 Since you are using max 6, you should check out EASYnat from Bionatics...it ships with max 6 and you can generate hundreds of 3D hybrid trees which are miles better than billboard trees...check them out at http://www.easynat.com Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Gnarly Cranium Posted May 25, 2004 Author Share Posted May 25, 2004 Have passed along the information about ADT models to the CAD guy, thanks a bunch! Am looking around at a bunch of different options for non-3d trees... it's hard to tell what will work and what won't. The RPC trees look like they'd work surprisingly well, though the types are pretty limited-- we have some weird trees here, and it's hard to find anything that looks like them. serpico-- Xfrog 4.1 is integrated with C4D, yes, but Xfrog 3.5 is a standalone modeling program, and they have plugins to send the models to half a dozen different apps. skana-- Gah! That would be completely awesome!! But what exactly does that mean, that EasyNat 'ships with max 6'... do I still have to buy it, or does it work??? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
quizzy Posted May 26, 2004 Share Posted May 26, 2004 That means you still have to buy their trees, which aren't very cheap... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
David Knourek Posted May 26, 2004 Share Posted May 26, 2004 Since you are using max 6, you should check out EASYnat from Bionatics...it ships with max 6 and you can generate hundreds of 3D hybrid trees which are miles better than billboard trees...check them out at http://www.easynat.com Are those the AEC Plants that come embedded in max6? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Gnarly Cranium Posted May 26, 2004 Author Share Posted May 26, 2004 Checking it out further-- would seem indeed that plants are the only additional cost for going with that option! I've seen Bionatics before, they seem to have one of the best plant solutions out there (goes from high-detail 3d alll the way down to 2d, with non-cloned random individual plants, etc etc etc) despite the relative lack of model selection. This will be totally cool.. now I've just got to figure out how to afford max 6 and a computer both at once. My comp-building buddy has quoted me an Athlon 64 3400+ machine with a GeForce FX5950Ultra for about $2000... apparently the GeForce can be tweaked a bit in the Quadro direction, which would be quite awesome, but I don't know if even MAX 6 could really talk to a 64-bit processor, and heck why have just one? More research is in order-- especially since I don't really have the time to spare experimenting with a system that may or may not be as fast as I'd like. The tension builds! Ooo! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
quizzy Posted May 26, 2004 Share Posted May 26, 2004 I dont think the 64 bit athlon is faster as a dual xeon... Greg?? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Gnarly Cranium Posted May 27, 2004 Author Share Posted May 27, 2004 That single Athlon isn't as fast as a single Xeon... but it's like half the price. Not sure about the cost/benefit of going dual Opteron, checking. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
AHaidar Posted May 27, 2004 Share Posted May 27, 2004 Here are a couple of benchmark articles that might be useful: http://tech-report.com/reviews/2004q2/opteron-x50/index.x?pg=1 http://www.sudhian.com/showdocs.cfm?aid=487&pid=1797 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
serpico Posted May 27, 2004 Share Posted May 27, 2004 Thanks guys for the input on the trees. In regards to hardware, I think the Xeon chips perform better than the AMD 64 ones. I was building a dual Xeon workstation over at Dell and the pricing wasn't too bad. Building your own, I've read is not as easy as building a regular desktop. There are many issues to consider such as power supplies and stock too. Local shops don't have alot of choices in regards to motherboards and even stock of Xeon's. It's not everyday someone walks in to buy a dual Xeon system! I'm not sure if Dell or any brand name makes good workstations with everything we would like. This is my first time looking into a power horse workstation. I usally build regular desktops, but this time (since the wife is onboard) I can seriously look into these high end systems. Any other experiences or suggestions, much appreciated. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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