Animation specs

[jasonwestmas]

Hello,

I'm being brave and have decided to start animating after three years of modeling and texturing. I figured I should make my art move and move.... well, like it's supposed to. I guess I didn't attend animation school only to make models and static pictures. So far I'm just a 3D illustrator.
Since I have this niftly diploma and license:rolleyes: to make animation with Lightwave I was wondering if I am going to need more Ram and/ or a New video Card to make some complex scenes.
I'm going for a realistic comic book style Which I guess means the character's realism is going to look like a really well done video game cinematic. (ie: Soul Caliber, Dead or Alive 3, Teken4, Final Fantasy XI) Maybe some of you like games. I mostly just like the cinematic art associated with this genre.
I'm not sure how many subpatches this will be because I rarely use subpatches.
Polywise my story board says I will need to animate at least 3 hi res character models in the same shot at 25,000 polys per character with really good texturing, big UV maps. I want the environment to be detailed as well for long and close shots. I'm using a dual 1Ghz G4, OSX 10.3.3 with LW7.5c, 512 MB Ram, and an ATI Radeon 9000 Vid card 64MB.
Does this sound like a high resolution type of project or still pretty low for this kind of machine?

Since I'm only experience with modeling and texturing (little rigging), any pointers are appreciated

Thanks

[gazmon]

I upgraded my Macs video card to a Nvidia 4ti 128mb from a 32mb becuase my polygons were very jerky and updated slow in modeller or and bounding boxes kept appearing in lightwave-hard to animate. It did make a difference but not as much as i expected. Then I changed the processor from 667mhz to 1.4mhz which has made the biggest difference (still lags a bit with lotsa polygons) so I think you can do what you want with your machine just expect a fair bit of waiting with test renders as I still find that slow. I reckon you may need to double your RAM though once you start adding photorealistic textures to your high poly models!
I've now hooked up a cheap PC and network render on both machines to speed things up.
Hope this helps
Gaz

[mlinde]

Your best bet is to upgrade the processor to a faster dual (1.3 or 1.25 dual are your choices, but they run $700 - $900 USD) and upgrade the RAM to at least 1GB. The video card will help somewhat, but with a decent 128 MB card running you close to an additional $300 or more you are really throwing a lot of money at a little performance boost. Even the processor upgrade is questionable, as far as "bang for buck" goes. Your only real boost that really matters would be the RAM. When you get into rendering final sequences, you will NEED to look into some sort of render farm solution

[jasonwestmas]

I have a PC as well. It's a 2.8 Ghz Pentium with 512MB of Ram and a 128MB ATI Video Card. Is there a way to get a cheap dual copy of LW so I can use LW on both computers? Would I have to get LW 8 for the Dual Dongle? Now that NT and Apple fixed a lot of LW's problems on OSX I'm pretty satisfied with LW7 so if I could get another copy of seven for my PC. . .

Thanks for you replies guys, I really appreciate it

Also, Do I need additional software to do network rendering with a Mac and PC?

[Zarathustra]

You're legally only allowed to install your one copy of LW on one computer, I believe.

That said, you could trade in your dongle for a duo dongle from NT and install on the PC.

No additional software needed for network rendering after you've got them networked, although there are 3rd party apps for it that sound easier to use then setting up Screamernet.

[mlinde]

Originally posted by Zarathustra
You're legally only allowed to install your one copy of LW on one computer, I believe. I don't know if it's one computer or not, because the application requires the dongle to run. Chuck Baker never said it was a problem when I installed the 7.5 PC version and was trying to get built in network controller to work, which required the full version on both Mac & Win. Of course, Chuck isn't a lawyer, but I couldn't run LW without the dongle on either machine, so it didn't matter how many machines it was on.

[Zarathustra]

Yes, the program needs to see the dongle in order to open.;)

[jasonwestmas]

Well I did some research and it looks like I'm looking at spending
500 for the upgrade to 8 then another 1000 for the extra license then 150+each for another 512 MB Ram in my Mac and my PC so I have a Gig in each computer. $1800 total. Any Ideas where I can get cheaper Ram than Apple?

Thanks

[mlinde]

I get good results with www.crucial.com -- if you use their tools to spec the RAM to buy, they have a good return/guarantee policy.

I recommend, whomever you buy from, that it is a full manufacturer (i.e. Micron, the parent of Crucial, makes the chips and the boards they go on). This ensures that the company is experienced and has some measure of QC for assembling RAM.

I would double check about the multiple license thing. If you are running the LWSN network rendering nodes, there are NO additional licenses needed to do that. Then you are just looking at hardware costs and (if you get it) the $500 for LW[8]

[gazmon]

Yep, Id recommend crucial aswell for memory but with screamernet (that comes with lightwave 7.5) you only need the one version of lightwave and then network the computers together you can render over the network. with just the one license. I'd recommend using screamernet controller to make it easier. It took me a while to get it working but the bloke who wrote it was very helpful. www.catalystproductions.cc/screamernet.
Gaz

[jasonwestmas]

WOW! This is powerful stuff. I'm obviously not a network rendering guy. I'll keep reading on this but I'm a little confused on how to render with my Windows Processor if I only have LW on my macintosh. Do I have to get the dual dongle? If so, then will my windows PC and Mac still render together with only one dongle key? I'd call Catalyst on this but I rather get this info from the horses mouth.;)

Thank you

[Zarathustra]

You don't need a dongle on anything but your host computer for screamernet rendering.

[gazmon]

no u dont need a dongle or lightwave installed. All you need to load on your pc is the LWSN rendering module (will be on the CD) so the PC can be seen by lightwave as a render node! It gets well confusing and you have to be careful where you keep all your object, image maps files etc so your pc can access them. Screamernet will just use the processor of the computer so your main mac will be node 1, pc will be node 2 etc... it renders frames out as still images which you can put together in a video editing package.
If you have the manual check out chapter 19.

[Zarathustra]

ACTUALLY, since you have a dual processor, the Mac would be node 1 AND node 2 with the PC being node 3.

[jasonwestmas]

Well, it looks like I'm going to have to use the intermediate ($150) version of screamernet to take advantage of both processors in my mac and the one processor in my windows box. I'll have to get the free dual dongle version of LW as well.
You guys are the bomb!:)

A little note from a relyable source:

Hi, Jason,

You will need Lightwave installed on all the computers, although you only need one dongle (if you have the CD that has both the Mac and PC versions you can just install the programs onto the PC. Lightwave will launch in demo mode but you can set the preferences successfully in
demo mode). As for the controller, you will need one node for each processor, having one version of LWSN running on each processor. So, in your case, you will need to have at least three nodes (two for the dual 1Ghz where you will launch two separate copies of LWSN, and one for the windows XP box). The Intermediate version will give you 5 nodes, so you will be able to add up to 2 more processors without having to upgrade.

Let me know if you have any more questions.

[Zarathustra]

You don't HAVE to use Catalyst's program to net render. It'll probably make things a lot easier for you (I've never tried it, so I don't know) but you don't HAVE to have it to do it.

Read your manual.
Search the forum for "screamernet".
My personal favorite tut for setting up a Mac screamernet:
http://homepage.mac.com/nonplanar/

The cmdline uses different punctuation on a PC ("/" instead of ":").

I've yet to try rendering with a PC node.

[gazmon]

lol! yep I noticed that it was a dual processor after i posted. Put it down to tiredness-staring at a computer too long!!
Gaz

[brayne]

Jason, there is a cheaper alternative to ScreamerNet Controller.

http://www.brucerayne.com/renderfarm.html