ZBrushCentral

Professional suggestions for workstations needed!

ZBrush Usage Questions
#1

Hello guys.
I wanted to ask you professionals out there what kind of workstations you are using.
Could you give me some suggestions for a high end, midprice and low cost solution for 3D modeling and rendeing workstation.

I know this is pretty much wishwash request but hey I still hope:)

The work I will be doing on this rig is mostly stills of product packaging, market locations with event placings. I ALSO want to be able to model with ZBrush and do fantasystyle art.
I currently work on a intel mac with 3.2 GHz Dual Quadcore xeon processors. On this rig I am already getting problems with workspeed when i model a big marketscene with many pallets and shelves and stuff.
The main application i am using for the businesspart is Cinema 4D. Other Applications will be ZBrush and maybe Maya.

Thanks in approach!

Endemo

#2

2 things to look at generally…good specs and workflow

for a pc your macpro seems good…
i have 8gig ram on my quadcore vista64 box, 512ram nvida card
for zbrush, get a wacom tablet and pen i have a bamboo medium and found it to be really good for zbrush work.

re cinema4d and ‘lots of gemometry’ are you using instsnces/proxies in your scene? rather than copy>>paste

#3

Sounds like you’ve already got quite a beefy machine. I’d start looking into various ways of scene optimisations. Offloading larger assets into low-res proxies, perhaps splitting up your scenes in to render layers… that sort of thing.

If C4D is 64Bit on OSX (I’m not sure) then see if you can get some more Ram in there. 16GB is pretty affordable these days.

#4

So there arent any “bigger” machines like there was silicon graphics years ago? Or anything like that?

Endemo

Edit: What kind of machines do professional 3D artists for the game or movie industry work on?
And what are those “workstation graphicscards” good for? I mean there must be any use for graphicscards that cost like 3k euros right?

#5

Well let’s see… You could go and get a Octo Core 2.93Ghz Mac Pro with a Raid card driving a set of striped 4x1TB SATA 3Gb/s 7200RPM drives with an ATI Radeon 4870 graphics card for about €7100. Then at Crucial.com buy 32GB of ram (8 x 4GB) for an additional €3350. So for a little over €10000 you’ll have a workstation that might solve your problems.
Then again, throwing money at a problem isn’t always the best solution… You’d be surprised how modest some of the workstations are in professional studios. Being clever about how you construct your scenes plays a large role in the job of a VFX-Artist.