PC Advice for Maya

[sherridge101]

Hi all

I'm after a little bit of advice for putting together 2x pcs.

We have a budget of around 5K (UK pounds) ish per machine.
The main purpose of the machines is for rendering high res Automotive imagery from high poly CAD data.

We're thinking possibly 2 cards, for previewing/rendering and a decent threaded CPU, but I would love your advice on this and on possible drive configurations.

We have 15 mac pros in the office, and we are looking at having standalone on these for additional render power:
We're thinking of

pc 1 with VRay GUI license with 10 render nodes

and the second pc with a VRay GUI license with 5 Render Nodes.

I'd also like to just double check that we can mix pc's with Mac render nodes?

Any other advice would be cool.

Cheers

[sherridge101]

Just thinking, we have benchmarks for GPU, CPU's speeds etc.

Might it be an idea to have a best VRay rig for $1K, $3K, $5K, $10K and $10K plus (in UK Pounds or US dollars).

And as and when new hardware becomes available, the lists can be updated.

[seandunderdale]

I just put together a new setup for the same reason. High res automotive using very heavy data sets, rendering 6k+. At work we have dual Xeon, quadro cards etc which cost circa 12k per machine. My home AMD Ryzen threadripper / 1080 Titan setup comes pretty close on the Vray benchmark and considering it cost 3.5k Id say thats the way to go. If you need out right speed and money is no object then maybe get a dual Epyc setup, but Im very very happy with the results from the 1950x Threadripper. High end Xeons are very fast, they just cost twice as much as the latest competition for roughly the same result.

Make sure all drives are SSD and you're away.

[sherridge101]

Hi Sean

Great, thanks for the advice.

Similar here. The machine is for work, so Xeon and Quadros are the way to go.
Do you mind if I ask which Xeon and cards you went for? And your RAM and disk setup?

Thanks very much.

[seandunderdale]

I'm on a dual Xeon E5-2699v3 and Quadro K5200, 64gb ram.(not sure which brand). 3 local SSDs but we work from the network server which I know nothing about.

Like I mentioned though, my new home setup I use for doing the same stuff I do at work, and its pretty much just as fast for a fraction of the cost (this has 64gb Corsair), so Xeons and Quadros aren't always the best option. My 1080 titan can push polys around just as well as my work quadro and and also has more memory.

I'm not super hot on the ins and outs of all the hardware, but I've not been able to tell the difference between my work and home setup.

[sherridge101]

Great stuff, thanks Sean.

[sherridge101]

Just thinking, are you rendering on your local machine, or sending off to a render farm?
If you're rendering locally, what sort of render times are you getting for 6K+ etc.

Sorry for all the question. Cheers again

[sherridge101]

Would be interested to know you render farm setup, or if you frequently render locally too.

Cheers again.

[seandunderdale]

At work we submit to the farm, unless its a rush job for a single beauty for eg. and we will distributed render in the frame buffer with 10 or so render nodes. At home Im just on my single machine. But in terms of render time it can totally depend on the shot. Some high res car shots have the car quite small in frame which can take 20mins for a render, but a full car interior car take about 6hrs for a 6k+ shot depending on complexity.

I dont know what the specs are on our farm unfortunately.

[sherridge101]

Cool, cheers again. Good to know. 10 nodes per image is doable, as we have 15 nodes we can take advantage of.