Re: Introduction

On 5/25/05, Frank Hellmann <[email protected]> wrote:

> In my opionion this will be determined by the 3D user to IT admin ratio.
> If you have only limited IT admin resources you should go with an easy
> off-the-shelve integrated option like Mental Ray. This gives you good
> performance, a good integration into your 3D application and minimal
> problems for your IT staff to deal with. In the early days we were using
> a pipeline from Softimage 3D to Renderman. Comparing that workflow (I
> should say workblockage) to a  Soft3D/XSI to MentalRay one, it was so
> obvious that we had to switch. No more handfiddeling scenes that didn't
> render as expected, getting shaders to work right and so on...

This is the kind of advice I need, thanks! We're not a lot of people
four  to eight by christmas, but only one barely competent linux
administrator, me (I've done sys admin jobs for Irix and Solaris
networks a couple of years) and one Windows NT administrator.

> I can second that. Bigger L2 cache is always a good investment.

My comp sci background says so as well, though as the Beowulf people
say, don't take someone's word for it, do the testing and profiling
yourself ;)

> No way. I wouldn't want to trade my Opteron boxes for anything right
> now. What makes the difference to Intel is, that you have a much better
> memory performance on Opteron boxes, due to the fact that Xeons do have
> to share the single memory bus with all CPUs. Especially rendering is a
> dependend on memory performance.

And that's the same problem with the Athlon MP as well, if I don't
recall wrongly.

> Also check if there are 64bit Versions of your renderer. Most
> applications start to offer them now. Advantage of this is, that you can
> use more than 2GB of system memory in an efficent way. Depending of your
> needs, this might also be a big plus of 64bit processors.

Mental Ray is, as you know. And I forsee pretty complex scenes both in
polygon count and in texture usage.

> The other machines are running Linux (Servers run Gentoo, Workstations
> RedHat (where required) and Debian). We do our rendering with our
> baselight grading software completely on Linux and I can say that this
> is absolutely stable. Rendering 100.000+ 2k frames without a single
> crash or reboot.

I stumbled upon this: http://www.artvps.com and wonder if anyone here
has opinions on or experiences with this? It sounds too good to be
true, but the prices are tempting and they run Render Man shaders, so
there are some content out there. I've asked them to arrange a
demonstration for me, I'm going to find some scenes to test out, which
I can use as my own benchmark on it.

Paul


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