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The idea of making your own 3D video, without spending $10K on HW and SW, and having 10 people working for you, is relatively new. I've only discovered it in the past year, and many have not discovered it yet. I'm struggling to learn the tools now. Every day I learn something new. So long as I don't quit, and so long as I can find people to learn from, as I do in this forum, I'll get there.
Very glad to hear that.
I do wonder from time to time about re-doing my old-forums series on Windows performance troubleshooting.
I started to learn Carrara since version 1 and since I am on this forum for a few month, I learn something almost each days, even when I answer a question of a member, I often withdraw from it something which I did not know.
Carrara is a splendid sofware and the members of this forum are extraordinary!
Yeah, I see that the URL is changed somehow...weird...here is the full text of the link:
http://www.techrepublic.com/blog/data-center/get-an-inside-look-at-a-secure-data-center/Wow. Quite the facility = that! My wife used to work for a place that had a really cool server room that I was allowed to see, during its creation. A conditioned air and temperature controlled cold box for their servers. They gave this thing better filters, ducts, and vents than the factory had for its workers (no real surprises there) and became invisible by the time construction was complete. Invisible, yet accessible if you knew how to get through security on the thing.
Thanks to you, now I got my eye on the 12 cores AMD Opteron 6344 Abu Dhabi. Prices vary between $340 and $489. Like you, I want to have two of them on a motherboard. I can get me a super workstation that is going to be my all-in-one 24 cores render farm for, maybe, under $3000. Woohoo!!
Damn, I won't be special anymore! :lol:
A lot of my cost were sunk into hard drives, I have 8x 1 TB drives across the two machines because their main purpose is to be running multiple virtual machines simultaneously. I dedicated one of the drives to just my 3D stuff. Carrara, DAZ content, LightWave, Photoshop, etc.
If I were building a dedicated system for just 3D, I'd definitely drop serious coin on a workstation grade video card. Maybe in summer 2014... ;)
Damn, I won't be special anymore! :lol:
A lot of my cost were sunk into hard drives, I have 8x 1 TB drives across the two machines because their main purpose is to be running multiple virtual machines simultaneously. I dedicated one of the drives to just my 3D stuff. Carrara, DAZ content, LightWave, Photoshop, etc.
If I were building a dedicated system for just 3D, I'd definitely drop serious coin on a workstation grade video card. Maybe in summer 2014... ;)
Don't worry Gars, you'll always be, "special" to us! :P
At the moment, I have three 1 TB hard drives. Two of them are on a Raid 0 array, and the other one is for backup. It's surprising how much faster you can retrieve data from a Raid 0 array. I wonder why people don't talk more about it.
And I also intend to "drop some serious coin" on a video card. And the best cooling system. Oh yeah.
DAAAAAAAW!!!! Shucks! :red:
(yes, I am fully aware of why you put quotes around the word...I chose to ignore them!)
At the moment, I have three 1 TB hard drives. Two of them are on a Raid 0 array, and the other one is for backup. It's surprising how much faster you can retrieve data from a Raid 0 array. I wonder why people don't talk more about it.
And I also intend to "drop some serious coin" on a video card. And the best cooling system. Oh yeah.
I had a Raid array, and it worked great until it failed! Luckily for me there were hints and I was able to back up the drive. In my case it wasn't a drive in the RAID that failed, it was the hardware RAID controller that took a dump. I was not to happy to tell the truth.
Didn't you mean:
DUUUUHHH!!!! Shucks! :red:
(yes, I am fully aware of why you put quotes around the word...I chose to ignore them!)
:lol: :lol: :lol:
Bazinga!
You might want to consider RAID-10 (at least you have a backup drive though).
RAID-0 is called "striping" and it means half your data is written to one drive and the other half to the second drive. Thus your reads and writes are 2x faster. But if you lose a drive, all of your data is now useless.
RAID-1 is called "mirroring" and each drive is a full copy of the other. No performance gain, but safety in duplication.
RAID-10 is a mirrored stripe set. The best of both worlds but at the cost of requiring more drives to implement.
There are other RAID types too but you don't often see them in consumer systems.
Mine was a mirrored RAID and I knew the risks- sort of. I thought the greatest chance for failure was with one of the drives, so I made sure I had enough back-up space in case it failed. The idea was to have a fast drive for video capture and video editing with the jobs being removed and archived on different drives when completed. Little did I know it would be a controller failure.
If I sent out xmas cards, you'd be off my list! :coolmad:
If I sent out xmas cards, you'd be off my list! :coolmad:
In our last little exchange, I recall you left me a smoldering pile of BURRRNNNNed forum meat! :lol:
It took me a few days for an opening! ;-)
I had to dry-clean my shirt to get all the ash off it. So turn-about is fair-play. :lol:
On this note, going back where we were saying that it's fine to stick with the less robust computers - I'll still hold to that, but...
...and here comes the "but..."
When I get back onto this machine, and fire up Carrara just to help myself respond to questions, I can hardly stand it. I mean, Carrara still works fine and all - just like it did when I first installed it on here, but even better, know that I know more about keeping my working file as small and optimized as possible, but the computer itself is so slow and sluggish compared to my workstation... a person becomes spoiled. But that's the way it really should be. Allow me to explain:
Just for an example I'm going to use our friend above a few posts: Argus 1000. Now I've learned a lot from him, seen many excellent renders, answers, animations, animation techniques... Argus has obvious spent some quality time with Carrara and has really learned the rope well. Now, anyone spending that much time in something like Carrara or anything else, for that matter, deserves to look into what really makes that software tick, and find or build something that can help further those endeavors. Truly.
If we put any value on the time we have left in this life, then time becomes more than mere money - time is also the clock ticking away our valuable lives. Gamers upgrade to try and stay competitive. Carraraists want to work more freely. More RAM allows for higher resolution textures in more quantities, more polygons, more... More cores with speed equals faster rendering as well as a much faster computing experience all the way around. My eight core is actually very fast compared to what I was used to... this thing.
I was thinking of upping my game next time around, going for two eight cores in the same box. But that means a lot more cash. With Argus talking about an AMD twelve core, then that's what I'll be using unless they have more by then. Fact is, I'll start with a rather intensely low budget - I always do. Then I manage that budget from the motherboard to the cpu, knowing that I'll need more for the rest. When my case is still in good condition, I can leave that out of the equation, only if I'm doing a complete replacement. Knowing the difference between my dual core and my eight core, I now know that going with twelve cores, just a single, would be a worthy upgrade if I could stick within my budget. I always find it a worthy investment to replace my working machine before the current one breaks down.
Knowing that Carrara is my main reason for turning on my computer, I decided to design around that, main purpose. Since I've always been satisfied with my working experience, I go for what ever would make my renders faster - so I go for more cpu cores. I'm very serious about Carrara - so I built a serious Carrara machine - even though I only had a thousand dollars to work with, I did it. It's just a PC-class computer tower, but the motherboard runs the eight core perfectly and accepts up to 32 GB RAM, I have 16.
After getting to know the Gars Man (Garstor), and he built his amazing machine, I've been dreaming that my next build would be a server-class powerhouse with two multiple core cpu chips. When I build it myself, I save a bundle. But server-class stuff comes at a steeper price. If I can afford to go that way, that's what I'll do, because I deserve it. What I can get Carrara do for me now compared to when I first installed it onto my eight core machine is vast. DAZ 3D are not just my publisher, they've really become my pals. They teach freely, when they can spare the time, and often someone can always seem to help. So now my learning curve is back where I love it - Intense!!! Intense computing works much better on an intensely serious machine.
Fact is, if you really want to get the most out of what you do, don't hesitate to invest in yourself. Humans have a finite time available for this stuff. If it's just an occasional hobby, Carrara actually has fairly low needs to run. Not only that, but if you practice keeping your working file (the one that's open) low on computer resources, which sometimes can be as simple as turning things off from your view, can provide an amazingly strong working experience in Carrara, even on some free computer that you've recycled from the side of the road. I used to be that person. And if something ever happened to my workstation before I could scrape together enough for a replacement, this baby will go right back into being a Carrara machine again. I'm fairly certain that Carrara is far easier on computer systems than DAZ Studio or Poser, along with a lot of other modern software. And that's magic, especially since I like using it so much more than anything else!
Oh my... was I babbling again?
You might want to consider RAID-10 (at least you have a backup drive though).
RAID-0 is called "striping" and it means half your data is written to one drive and the other half to the second drive. Thus your reads and writes are 2x faster. But if you lose a drive, all of your data is now useless.
RAID-1 is called "mirroring" and each drive is a full copy of the other. No performance gain, but safety in duplication.
RAID-10 is a mirrored stripe set. The best of both worlds but at the cost of requiring more drives to implement.
There are other RAID types too but you don't often see them in consumer systems.RAID 0 is excellent in the way that it actually doubles the speed of the throughput! I did that, but decided that I didn't need the speed increase. It took me a while to get those drives from being RAID drives, but I did it. Actually, I have Windows to thank for that, as it helped me immensely! :)
Like a brook! :P
Like a brook! :POh man! As cold as it's been around here, it's a real challenge keeping my babbling brook running! Yikes! Freezing of water causes degrees of evaporation, so I made a little hoop-house cover for the stream, and a little dome for the main spot where the fish are hibernating - or whatever they do that causes them to not need food! LOL
Still, the fish area is completely frozen over. I have the tiny submersible pumps from my winterized water features buried in that area, just keeping the water moving so it won't freeze solid in the event that the stream system freezes over like it did last year (lost all my fish and frogs). I have a fill hose installed to my basement that so far drains faster than it can freeze - so it's been working great. So one of my daily routines has been to look under the snow at the waterfall to make sure the water is flowing through, and then checking the level of water in the skimmer box, where the main pump resides. That main pump pushes most of the water it pumps to the waterfall and the rest about a third of the way upstream, again, to assist in freeze prevention of the system.
So far, so good. But with these negative temperatures, it's been scary some of those days, when there was no water flowing. Luckily, I was able to revive the flow each time before it froze too tight! :)
Sorry for the side-track... ep's brook comment got me babbling like a brook again! :ahhh:
here's my babbling brook right after I installed it. It's much smaller than it looks. Now that dying fern-leaf sumac in the foreground at the beginning is replaced with a gorgeous miniature Birch that looks like a paper birch, but it's actually a "Fox Valley River Birch", named "Jag" after a good friend mural artist who has recently passed away. All of my expensive miniature trees are planted in memory of, and named after a fallen friend. The brook now looks amazingly natural - like it's been there all along. Birds love it. I became a water artist early in my landscaping career, and have been absolutely successful at attracting tiny song birds. Shallow, mellow-moving trickle-bound water. The shallower you can get the run, the smaller the birds you can get to play in it. So mine has a range of shallow spots - making the act of keeping the thing up to level a challenge - because I don't have an auto-fill installed, since I'm just renting this place. Thousands of dollars worth of landscaping in a rental... when will I ever learn? Can't help it. I love it!
I don't know if I deserve this compliment, but thanks! I try to learn more and more about Carrara, but the path is infinite... this program has so many resources and angles. Right now, I'm struggling with the particle emitter. I'm still learning. But if I can contribute sometime with an idea or two of my own, than that's cool.
I'm a consumer (maybe a geeky one with a little extra cash to spend) and Raid 5 is the way to go. You get the performance and availability. Its striping with parity data spread across all drives. If you loose a drive, your data is still available (if you loose access to more than one drive, data is lost). But of course you need more than 2 drives to implement (and a controller/subsystem that supports it).
I was hoping someone would bring up RAID-5! :coolgrin:
You need a minimum of 3 drives to implement it. However, be careful using the word "performance" with it. ;) Reads are fine but writes are much more costly (calculating and writing that parity data). Also, if you do lose a drive your read performance will be severely hurt while the system calculates the missing data from the parity information. Lastly, if you lose two drives, you are hosed.
We're going far off the beaten path for 3D work here. RAID systems are typically used in servers where up-time and data survivability are paramount. The vast majority of us can get away with a single drive and keeping their important files backed-up on other stable media.
So I've stumbled into a den of builders. Another reason to like this forum. I only bought one ready-made desktop in my life, that was my first - a Compaq 386-20 Deskpro.
It has been said that any speed increase less than a factor of three is imperceptible. If that's true (and I think it is), your next move should be to 24 cores, rather than 12. :cheese:
As a capable hobbyist, I consider the benefit to the overall movie making process including planning, production, and post production for animations or live action. I tend to not chime into these discussions because we are not all using our systems for the same things and don't have the same requirements.
Anyway, we are all justified in what we use and will have what our bank accounts (or spouses) allow us to purchase.
It has been said that any speed increase less than a factor of three is imperceptible. If that's true (and I think it is), your next move should be to 24 cores, rather than 12. :cheese:
Agreed! And then toss on these eight as an additional node! ;)
I also agree with Ty
I read Darts post elsewhere in the forum on building computers and a couple weeks ago just built a system from newegg, got a bundle pack AMD 8 core system, only started with 8gigs of ram but can go 32. 1Terrabyte, 1gig Radeon card, case with 4 built in fans plus expandable to water cooled and an operating system, cheap keyboard and mouse for $70O
Been using it and happy with the speed.
8GB is a solid start and probably suitable for most users (even renderers). Your total backing storage is RAM plus paging file...Windows manages that by default. You can tweak the paging file directly if you like. Being disk-based, paging will be slow...so adding RAM only makes sense when you need more of your backing storage to be super-fast memory chips.
I'm betting 8-16 GB is plenty for just about any home user. I went to 64 GB primarily because it was a server platform running multiple VMs.