Renderstation for work

[pomp0m]

Hello All,

 

I'm a bit in a bind, at work we have made a small mistake with the PC power needed by a "3d Animator".

 

Bit of context:

We are a company that design our own Lasercutters(like the one last shown in the video from Linus but then a bit bigger :-)) Since we design ourselves and our number 1 concern is Customer care instead of sales. (We really want our customers to sell our machine's instead of us, so they need to be impressed) but lasers are sometimes hard to explain so we want to make allot of 3d animation tutorial videos.

 

we already started with a Beam alignment Animation and that went well till we started with the rendering. then we were a bit shocked. now we hijack everybody's pc on the Content department (4 PC's in total)  and it still takes 2 weeks rendering (24/7)

the used PC's are:

HP Workstation Z240:

E3-1245v5: 4 Core - 8 threads, 3.50GHz (3.90GHz turbo), 32GB/512SSD/2TB/AMD-W5100

 

with 1 of the 4 stations with a Nvidia Quadro P2000 that was the first hope jump

 

so now we want to Buy a new render pc all together to make sure that we can render quicker and thus make more animations per time.

 

we asked our ict supplier and he said this would be a good setup:

HP Workstation Z840:                                  2xE5-2680v4: 14 Core - 28 threads, 2.40GHz (3.30GHz turbo), 32GB/512SSD/NVIDIA Quadro P6000 24GBGDDR5X

but I really want to know if it's a good investment. Rendering is not my ICT passion point so I don't know what the performance increase will be in real life.

what now take's 2 weeks how long will it take then?

 

are there other good systems we can think of? price is a bit of a vague issue. if the results make it that its cheaper in the long term then the initial costs aren't a real problem, only a discussion point.

 

the Z240 costs us €2000.- excl tax and the Z840 costs us €13,000.- so those are the indication prices. we are stated in the Netherlands.

 

is there anyone here that knows enough about 3d rendering in 3dmax and is a pc builder that can assist us in a good pc that will reduce the render times from 2 weeks to allot shorter.

(rendersettings used  are in the attachments)

 

currently, so the render times are on average 1week rendering give's on average 4 seconds video.

 

[FloRolf]

So right now you are processing 4 renders in parallel on the 4 Z240s? Or are they somehow connected to a cluster? 

 

Because honestly the best price/performance would be to get a Threadripper 1950X, a cheap mobo and some ram for it, then build the whole thing 10x to be at roughly 13000€ of the Z840 while having 160 cores instead of 28, but in 10 systems instead of one. 

[pomp0m]

we are now rendering individual batches. we installed 3ds max on every pc and then set a render queue as individual on every pc. we wanted to look at a cluster but as of now we didn't have the time for it yet.

 

But does Threadripper scale 3dsmax rendering as good as a Xeon? we now use the Mentalray Render engine together with the Quadro card.