Rig for CG Visualization under 1000$-1500$

[Shirogatsu]

My gaming PC is too old and slow for my visualization needs and I decide to upgrade some stuff(Including case and everything inside except hard drive).

My main tools are 3dsMax with Vray a renderer, Zbrush and Photoshop. I'm not big fan of Vray RT, IRay and similiar stuff aand my scenes are rarely extremely huge.

Most of the time I render stills, animation work occurs rarely

Thank you in advance!

[Chris MacDonald]

If your scenes are rarely huge, I can't personally understand why you wouldn't want to go down the GPU rendering route?

[Shirogatsu]

If your scenes are rarely huge, I can't personally understand why you wouldn't want to go down the GPU rendering route?

I'm not sure I'm ready to change my pipeline. Plus, it less flexible I believe

[rezk]

Hi Dmitry,

 

I can understand your reluctance to switch over to a GPU pipeline, but from what I've seen so far, V-Ray 3.0 should come with render element support from GPU renders - so maybe it will finally be an acceptable alternative to traditional CPU workflows in terms of flexibility... Anyway, you can always invest in a decent hardware configuration with a relatively low-end graphics card for now and then upgrade (or add more GPUs) later should you feel that your workload demands change.

 

For around US$1,500 I would personally recommend something like an Intel i7 4770k with a decent CLC (e.g. Corsair H100i), a decent motherboard (e.g. Asus Z87WS), around 16GB of memory, an SSD and a storage drive, and a GeForce GTX 760 (which should be more than enough for viewport performance as well as GPU rendering on small to mid-sized scenes). All of this should fit nicely into your budget of $1,000 to $1,500 including case, fans, power supply, etc. with maybe even some cash to spare for new peripherals...

 

Hope this helps and good luck with your system build.