Input on animation computers

[Papa P]

I am looking into building a set of computers specifically for animation. I don't have a budget at the moment because this project is potentially sponsored but I would still like to know what should go into these systems. The primary animation software that will be used is blender. I would prefer a small form factor system because the plan is to have them all in a stack/cabinet/corner and route all the cables through thunderbolt hubs to monitors and peripherals. What monitor would be best suited for animation work, specifically what should I look for when researching one?

 

Thank you for the help.

[trag1c]

11 minutes ago, Link357 said:

I am looking into building a set of computers specifically for animation. I don't have a budget at the moment because this project is potentially sponsored but I would still like to know what should go into these systems. The primary animation software that will be used is blender. I would prefer a small form factor system because the plan is to have them all in a stack/cabinet/corner and route all the cables through thunderbolt hubs to monitors and peripherals. What monitor would be best suited for animation work, specifically what should I look for when researching one?

 

Thank you for the help.

Are you rendering as well or simply rigging and animating a mesh?

[Lcast15]

Well depends what your animating, if your animating professional work, go for something thats color accurate, 4k and around 100hertz. Possible 66 if you dont need the extra hertz

[Papa P]

39 minutes ago, trag1c said:

Are you rendering as well or simply rigging and animating a mesh?

I might have access to rendering servers but it is unsure at this time. Give me a solution for both situations, please.

[trag1c]

4 hours ago, Link357 said:

I might have access to rendering servers but it is unsure at this time. Give me a solution for both situations, please.

Sorry for the late reply.

 

This would be a very high performance Blender rig as I am just going to assume that you're sponsored and have a big budget to make things easy. As far as price to performance goes its not going to be great for this system but ultimately if this is for professional use than that is irrelevant as productivity is the primary concern when building a system like this. Now for some part explanations.

 

CPU) Basically everything but rendering for the most part uses your CPU. Blender will take advantage of every core that you can give it.

 

Cooler) Low profile ish, rock solid noctua cooler.

 

Motherboard) Legendary ASUS reliability, support for Xeon processors, tons of 16x pcie lanes for possible future expansion.

 

Ram) Blender loves to use memory, especially on high complexity scenes so I would never personally run less than 32GB in a professional use case as its very easy to use large amounts of memory as a project grows.

 

Storage) For boot, applications and Immediate working material storage I selected 2 Samsung 850 pro drives for extremely fast and reliable storage. I would set these in RAID 1 so that in case you lose a drive all of you're workflow and system customization are not lost. I am assuming that you have a NAS of some sort for bulk project storage but if not then I would add a couple of WD Red or Seagate NAS drives in RAID 1 with a capacity that will match your project sizes.

 

GPU's) I am going to assume that you need to render but if not I would simply get a single GTX 960 4GB and call it a day. Anyways this is bit of a tough choice as there are 2 options I would consider. I would either get GTX 1080(s) or GTX Titan X(s). With the GTX 1080 you would have higher performance but you wouldn't be able to match the maximum total scene complexity as you would with a Titan X simply because the Titan X has 4GB's more VRAM. So you would ultimately either have to make a judgement call based on what you can see for the current project and possibly future projects. Having more GPU's as well significantly decreases render times as you see much better performance scaling than you would with games. The simple reason for this is that each GPU is completely independent from the other. SLI is not used with this.

 

A bit more on GPU's you could also run Tesla's or Quadro's but unless you have an extremely money is no object budget then they don't make any sense with 1 exception being you're rendering for 24/7 simply because they have much better validation than GTX series GPU's. You could also use AMD GPU's as well with blender as there is OpenCL support but as far as I know CUDA is far more optimized than OpenCL. I have also never used an AMD GPU with blender so I really can't make a judgement call there.

 

Case) Small, quiet, cheap and rather uninteresting, perfect for sitting in a closet or a corner.

 

PSU) This PSU has rock solid reliability as well high effeciency and a 7 year manufacturer warranty. Wattage is high enough to have a fair bit of possible expansion ranging from multiple GPUs to dual socket Xeons. 

 

Displays) Having multiple windows open across multiple monitors is absolutely necessary if one is serious about productivity. These monitors have plenty of screen real estate so to speak while maintaining fantastic color accuracy.

 

Peripherals) I left this out simply because this is an extremely personal choice.

 

PCPartPicker part list / Price breakdown by merchant

CPU: Intel Xeon E5-2630 V4 2.2GHz 10-Core Processor  ($649.99 @ SuperBiiz) 
CPU Cooler: Noctua NH-L9x65 33.8 CFM CPU Cooler  ($48.99 @ Amazon) 
Motherboard: Asus X99-M WS Micro ATX LGA2011-3 Motherboard  ($263.99 @ SuperBiiz) 
Memory: Kingston FURY 64GB (4 x 16GB) DDR4-2400 Memory  ($239.99 @ Newegg) 
Storage: Samsung 850 Pro Series 1TB 2.5" Solid State Drive  ($426.55 @ Amazon) 
Storage: Samsung 850 Pro Series 1TB 2.5" Solid State Drive  ($426.55 @ Amazon) 
Video Card: EVGA GeForce GTX Titan X 12GB Superclocked Video Card (2-Way SLI)  ($1049.99 @ B&H) 
Video Card: EVGA GeForce GTX Titan X 12GB Superclocked Video Card (2-Way SLI)  ($1049.99 @ B&H) 
Case: Fractal Design Core 2300 ATX Mid Tower Case  ($39.99 @ Newegg) 
Power Supply: Corsair 1000W 80+ Platinum Certified Fully-Modular ATX Power Supply  ($194.99 @ NCIX US) 
Operating System: Microsoft Windows 10 Pro OEM 64-bit  ($129.95 @ B&H) 
Monitor: LG 34UC97-S 34.0" 60Hz Monitor  ($799.99 @ Amazon) 
Monitor: LG 34UC97-S 34.0" 60Hz Monitor  ($799.99 @ Amazon) 
Total: $6120.95
Prices include shipping, taxes, and discounts when available
Generated by PCPartPicker 2016-06-08 01:55 EDT-0400

 

[Papa P]

On 6/8/2016 at 2:38 AM, trag1c said:

Sorry for the late reply.

 

This would be a very high performance Blender rig as I am just going to assume that you're sponsored and have a big budget to make things easy. As far as price to performance goes its not going to be great for this system but ultimately if this is for professional use than that is irrelevant as productivity is the primary concern when building a system like this. Now for some part explanations.

 

CPU) Basically everything but rendering for the most part uses your CPU. Blender will take advantage of every core that you can give it.

 

Cooler) Low profile ish, rock solid noctua cooler.

 

Motherboard) Legendary ASUS reliability, support for Xeon processors, tons of 16x pcie lanes for possible future expansion.

 

Ram) Blender loves to use memory, especially on high complexity scenes so I would never personally run less than 32GB in a professional use case as its very easy to use large amounts of memory as a project grows.

 

Storage) For boot, applications and Immediate working material storage I selected 2 Samsung 850 pro drives for extremely fast and reliable storage. I would set these in RAID 1 so that in case you lose a drive all of you're workflow and system customization are not lost. I am assuming that you have a NAS of some sort for bulk project storage but if not then I would add a couple of WD Red or Seagate NAS drives in RAID 1 with a capacity that will match your project sizes.

 

GPU's) I am going to assume that you need to render but if not I would simply get a single GTX 960 4GB and call it a day. Anyways this is bit of a tough choice as there are 2 options I would consider. I would either get GTX 1080(s) or GTX Titan X(s). With the GTX 1080 you would have higher performance but you wouldn't be able to match the maximum total scene complexity as you would with a Titan X simply because the Titan X has 4GB's more VRAM. So you would ultimately either have to make a judgement call based on what you can see for the current project and possibly future projects. Having more GPU's as well significantly decreases render times as you see much better performance scaling than you would with games. The simple reason for this is that each GPU is completely independent from the other. SLI is not used with this.

 

A bit more on GPU's you could also run Tesla's or Quadro's but unless you have an extremely money is no object budget then they don't make any sense with 1 exception being you're rendering for 24/7 simply because they have much better validation than GTX series GPU's. You could also use AMD GPU's as well with blender as there is OpenCL support but as far as I know CUDA is far more optimized than OpenCL. I have also never used an AMD GPU with blender so I really can't make a judgement call there.

 

Case) Small, quiet, cheap and rather uninteresting, perfect for sitting in a closet or a corner.

 

PSU) This PSU has rock solid reliability as well high effeciency and a 7 year manufacturer warranty. Wattage is high enough to have a fair bit of possible expansion ranging from multiple GPUs to dual socket Xeons. 

 

Displays) Having multiple windows open across multiple monitors is absolutely necessary if one is serious about productivity. These monitors have plenty of screen real estate so to speak while maintaining fantastic color accuracy.

 

Peripherals) I left this out simply because this is an extremely personal choice.

 

PCPartPicker part list / Price breakdown by merchant

CPU: Intel Xeon E5-2630 V4 2.2GHz 10-Core Processor  ($649.99 @ SuperBiiz) 
CPU Cooler: Noctua NH-L9x65 33.8 CFM CPU Cooler  ($48.99 @ Amazon) 
Motherboard: Asus X99-M WS Micro ATX LGA2011-3 Motherboard  ($263.99 @ SuperBiiz) 
Memory: Kingston FURY 64GB (4 x 16GB) DDR4-2400 Memory  ($239.99 @ Newegg) 
Storage: Samsung 850 Pro Series 1TB 2.5" Solid State Drive  ($426.55 @ Amazon) 
Storage: Samsung 850 Pro Series 1TB 2.5" Solid State Drive  ($426.55 @ Amazon) 
Video Card: EVGA GeForce GTX Titan X 12GB Superclocked Video Card (2-Way SLI)  ($1049.99 @ B&H) 
Video Card: EVGA GeForce GTX Titan X 12GB Superclocked Video Card (2-Way SLI)  ($1049.99 @ B&H) 
Case: Fractal Design Core 2300 ATX Mid Tower Case  ($39.99 @ Newegg) 
Power Supply: Corsair 1000W 80+ Platinum Certified Fully-Modular ATX Power Supply  ($194.99 @ NCIX US) 
Operating System: Microsoft Windows 10 Pro OEM 64-bit  ($129.95 @ B&H) 
Monitor: LG 34UC97-S 34.0" 60Hz Monitor  ($799.99 @ Amazon) 
Monitor: LG 34UC97-S 34.0" 60Hz Monitor  ($799.99 @ Amazon) 
Total: $6120.95
Prices include shipping, taxes, and discounts when available
Generated by PCPartPicker 2016-06-08 01:55 EDT-0400

 

Thank you very much for putting in the time to make this list of parts and educate me on what the hardware you selected was needed for.

[Papa P]

On 6/8/2016 at 2:38 AM, trag1c said:

 

So let's say that I don't have sponsorship's and I'm footing the bill out of pocket. Could you make a compromise build for less than $2000?

[trag1c]

 

2 hours ago, Link357 said:

So let's say that I don't have sponsorship's and I'm footing the bill out of pocket. Could you make a compromise build for less than $2000?

If you dont mind holding off for about 4 days I can. I just started camping and I am nearing my data cap. As well as its very poor reception where I am so things take a while to load xD.

[Papa P]

17 hours ago, trag1c said:

 

If you dont mind holding off for about 4 days I can. I just started camping and I am nearing my data cap. As well as its very poor reception where I am so things take a while to load xD.

Yeah no prob.