Bricks in Motion
We are a friendly filmmaking community devoted to the art of stop-motion animation using LEGO® and similar construction toys. Here, you can share your work, join our community of other brickfilmers, and participate in periodic animation contests!
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Currently Ive been hooked on blender and am making reallyy good progress
As i get into th more advanced techniques i notice my comp really start to slow down like when im weight painting with particles or the cloth simultaion things like that
I currently have a mac book pro running 5gb of and an external monitor
what changes could i make to help blender run faster
Get a larger hardrive, or purchase a better graphics card. What is your card? I use a NVidia Ge-force. Then again... I'm not into CGI.
Oh BTW, correct me if I'm wrong.
A render farm. A necessity for companies, an expensive luxury investment for amateurs like us. Particle emitters, cloth simulation, all these involve complex calculation that the CPU must process to generate results and that usually takes time. So what you need is more CPU. One way to do it is to link multiple computers together to share the workload.
Harddrive is for storage. It has nothing to do with animation other than to store the models, projects and rendered footage. Graphics card? It would help to have a GPU handle the 3D renderings.
Take great care choosing your graphics card for Blender as some (Particularly ATI) have problems Screen rendering solid objects.
When you are rendering your frames your graphics card isn't used. This is what really tests your PC. Rendering raytraced images can take many weeks. I'm not sure of how well Blender uses multiple processor CPU's , but I have an AMD dual core 6000+ .This has a faster Clock speed than the currnet batch of Quad Cores and works quite well.
Go for a desktop PC not a laptop as they are more easily upgradable. Get a standard size case not a micro sized as Processors run hot when rendering and also this gives you the choice of all components on the market.
Get a powerfull power supply (400 watts +) modern PCs are power hungry. Take note of the specs of the processor fans and power supply. When you are running a PC on full load the fans speed up and can be very noisy rendering at night when your trying to sleep!
Dont worry about buying lots of Memory (Motherboard RAM). I did lots of render trials adding more and more memory and it didn't seem to make any difference. 1GB is enough.
You also need a very big monitor...The biggest you can afford as the menus take up all the screen particularly when animating (setting keyframes etc.) Consider a dual monitor Graphics card even if you only have one monitor as you can buy a second later. Dual monitor cards are not much more expensive than a single monitor card and are handy when you want to look at reference images whilst you are working in Blender.
Most PC Hard drive are easily big enough for your work. an 80 GB ie easily enough unless you are planning on doing Star Wars episode 10!
The last tip is
BUILD IT YOURSELF........ its quite easy and you will never buy another complete PC again. Just buy the Motherboard, Processor and onboard RAM at the same so they are compatible.
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