Animation time / length and PC Spec

[bikerchris]

Hi all,

Just wondering if these seems fairly typical, or if I've completely lost the plot and gone OTT.

My machine is currently Twilight Rendering 10 scenes @ 5 second duration per slide. The animation is 50 seconds long @ 24 frames per second (total of 1201 frames), 1920 x 912 pixels (I tried 700 wide and it looks awful). It's currently at frame 699 after 29 hours, so sort of not long to go.

I just wonder if my computer is too lame now that I'm moving onto larger models:

CPU: i5 2500k @ 3.3 / 3.6Ghz (not O/C to keep reliability)
MOBO: Gigabyte GA-Z68XP-UD4
RAM: Crucial Ballistix 8GB @ 1600 MHz
Graphics: GeForce GTX 560Ti OC 1024MB
SSD: Intel 530 Series

I'd like to upgrade but I want to make it a worthwhile one, I use Sketchup & AutoCAD mainly. I used to do gaming but these days I'm only at the computer when I'm working! So I'm thinking of:

Xeon E5-1620 (appreciating single thread use of CAD/Sketchup)
SuperMicro mobo (unknown which one yet)
Quadro K5000 Graphics (to help SketchUp and for reliability and accuracy)
Some nice ECC RAM, probably 16GB (I've read up about this too, and despite the possible pointlessness of getting ECC, my machine gets a heavy amount of use and I can't afford for it to fail me mid-project)
SSD: Intel 530 Series (stolen from the original setup)

In principle, does anyone think this would be a worthwhile upgrade? Will it speed up rendering and working on large Sketchup models nicely? Perhaps I've reached the limitations of the programmes - I do remove face hungry components when I'm working on them as well as 'draft' styles which cut out the face textures/images, it's just sluggish when I come to view the finished article. I've trawled through so many websites looking for opinions, and they seem extensive and contradictory...humph! I've also looked at benchmarks, but the graphics lean more towards gaming comparisons, and I believe this isn't appropriate for my needs (something about frame rate not being so useful for CAD/SU).

Look forward to any comments, and please don't bite my head off

Cheers,

Chris

[Fletch]

a quad core - corei5 - is a decent enough computer, but for serious animation rendering, it will obviously not cut it.
for serious rendering, get as many cores as possible, but for animation, you will want to render in chunks, using several machines - as fast machines as possible, and piece the chunks together into a final animation in after editing.

[bikerchris]

Fletch to the rescue

Thanks for responding, much appreciated.

I did think about getting 6/8 cores, but as well as the price going up, the speed goes down - and I'd like the speed for CAD/Sketchup. I'm guessing that an ideal situation is one nippy machine, and having 4 node machines to help with the rendering eh?

Thanks again!

[Fletch]

well, in rendering corei7 of equal ghz speed against i5, i7 will win every time... the longer the render times, the more important it is.
it's important to have a good video card, so that the corei5 or i7 - especially if using laptops - so that the cpu is not also doing double duty as gpu while working or rendering.

I presume you've seen the official speed thread?
Subject: How Fast Are You - Official Twilight Scene - Bauhaus Lamp

skip to the later pages, like last 6 pages of that thread to see later model machines that are really great render machines.

Yes several... 5 or more 8 core machines that are reasonable price will serve you well for animations. Of course you will want one particularly speedy machine for your main work machine... and you will want to learn to optimize your camera setup so that you can easily break up your animations among several machines.

see also:

Twilight Render currently supports network rendering FOR FREE via Kerkythea Echo which serves as an external Render Studio.

1. Export to XML.
2. Open in (free) Kerkythea on as many computers on your network as you wish.
3. Render with network (follow network render instructions on Kerkythea's website). A network farm in Kerkythea.

[bikerchris]

Fantastic information as always Fletch, thank you.

I did consider an i7, but I figure (possibly wrongly) that an Xeon setup will give me more reliability for the primary machine, does that sound right or have I been manipulated by advertising!?!

The graphics card I've chosen should be beefy enough, and again I chose it for reliability as well as performance (I hope!).

Thanks for that link to the test, very useful and interesting indeed!

Really appreciate it Fletch, you're a gent