Want to buy to Speed Up Render times in Maya

[nxfxcom]

Hello,

i want to speed things up, i currently have 2k to spend!
My current system is:
2x 3 GHz Quad-Core Intel Xeon
12 GB 800MHz DDR2 Ram
ATI Radeon 4870 512 MB
OSX Leopard

What could i purchase to speed up maya work/render times?
A fast Raid setup?
The new Quadro for Mac?
any other suggestions ?


Thanks

 

[ckmaes]

My only suggestion would be to build a dedicated rendering machine with the $2k, maybe even more than one. A couple of new i7 boxes with some decent RAM should do it. No need for expensive GPU's or any other extras.
By doing this you can offload your rendering tasks to the networked render farm and that leaves you with all of your current power for your scenes in Maya.
As far as speeding things up in general Maya use, I'm not too sure what you could add to make any big improvements... you already have a fairly high spec machine.

 

[fluidedge]

The machine you have is quite sufficient.

Buy or build a renderfarm. Or use the money to spend on professional renderfarm hours.

Or buy a PURE ray tracing card from ART VPS. But really i'd save the money and spend it on professional renderfarm time as and when you need it.

 

[fluidedge]

Or (just a thought) ditch the horrendous mac version of maya and buy the Windows 64 bit version. Your render times will improve i guarantee it.

 

[nxfxcom]

The machine you have is quite sufficient.

Buy or build a renderfarm. Or use the money to spend on professional renderfarm hours.

Or buy a PURE ray tracing card from ART VPS. But really i'd save the money and spend it on professional renderfarm time as and when you need it.

Thank you,

my only problem is that i am a PERFECTIONIST, i always send my final results to a remote renderfarm, but i spend DAYS tweaking fine-tuning, re-tweaking and that involves me rendering results over and over again! so i spend a huge amount of time rendering test renders before sending it of!

 

[nxfxcom]

Or (just a thought) ditch the horrendous mac version of maya and buy the Windows 64 bit version. Your render times will improve i guarantee it.

Do you think on Bootcamp if would make a big difference?
OR should i do the external render computer? What would be a good one?

Thanks so much

 

[fluidedge]

I would frankly forget that maya ever existed on a mac and move over to windows. It's a much more stable version. It's 64 bit. FCheck is useable. Plugins/shaders are more readily avaliable - the list goes on, i can't think of a single reason to use mac for maya.

Maya runs great in bootcamp.

Building your own renderfarm probably isn't a good idea on reflection. It's not as glamorously efficient as it sounds and you're better off outsourcing as and when you need or buying another machine and rendering frames 1-100 on machine A and 101-200 on machine B, say.

I'd be inclined to save the money rather than trying to chase better render times. Render overnight or just wait an extra 20 mins. Not a big deal really. You have a very powerful system as it is.

With all due respect i think you need to learn how to get your renders right first time rather than re-rendering frame after frame just to tweek. Are you trying to create the perfect render within maya?! Unusual to say the least. We usually split the render up into a dozen or so passes and composite them together so you can tweek specular highlights on that toenail in a package like shake or nuke etc

Perhaps spend the 2k on shake and some training courses

 

[nxfxcom]

I would frankly forget that maya ever existed on a mac and move over to windows. It's a much more stable version. It's 64 bit. FCheck is useable. Plugins/shaders are more readily avaliable - the list goes on, i can't think of a single reason to use mac for maya.

Maya runs great in bootcamp.

Building your own renderfarm probably isn't a good idea on reflection. It's not as glamorously efficient as it sounds and you're better off outsourcing as and when you need or buying another machine and rendering frames 1-100 on machine A and 101-200 on machine B, say.

I'd be inclined to save the money rather than trying to chase better render times. Render overnight or just wait an extra 20 mins. Not a big deal really. You have a very powerful system as it is.

Okay,

i guess i will have togo with that then
BOOTCRAMP here i come

Thank you for your advice!

 

[fluidedge]

well it doesn't hurt to try it for a couple of weeks.

good luck.