SGI computers

[stuartscanlon]

You need to keep up with the industry a little better. By the time Maya is released for OSX there will be a few cards to choose from that dust most of the cards people on this board use. There will, for example, be a GVX equivalent. Also, they are working on the drivers for the next gen Wildcat. I look forward to racing my Quad proc 540 (still the fastest specced renderer out there) with a dual G4 next spring. If Maya is coded for Altivec it should be a fun test. In my working production environment we run Macs (new G4s and old G3s) along side NT machines (Integraph, SGI 540, Dell w/vfx) and we get much more reliability out of the Macs. Now, everyone has their own anecdotal evidence about which OS is more stable, so it is safe to disregard any of the heresay, including mine. However, any MCSE (that's microsoft certified) will tell you that NT does need to be re-installed from time to time due to all the crap it dumps in the temp directory. Does this mean 30 times in a year? Perhaps not. Still, this is never a concern on any UNIX based OS.

have a lovely day

[bvocal]

Lad, your way to young to get all hung up by spending gobs of bread on this just to limit yourself, therefor, do not by an SGI or an Intergraph.
Buy yourself a bag of standard and high quality parts and make a monsterkiller machine.
either a dual 700 mhz pentium or a single athalon 900 mhz (cheaper than dual by lots..)
get 256 or 512 mb ram.
Get 2 harddrives, a 9 gig for c-drive and only put system and apps and swapfile on this.
Buy a 30 or so gig drive for D and put all of your work files on this, this way if you bollox up your system you don't loose your work.
Get a perfectly flat 19" monitor.
Buy a 3dlabs GMX 210 or 410 display card, they are as fast a wildcat in the real world and cost at least 2400$ less, and run dual monitors, which rocks....
buy a 6x9 Wacom tablet.
essential for real work.
Do win nt 4 or win2k, they both work fine but win2k pro is more feauterd and does usb, which I highly recommend ... and then make your tablet a usb one and you can hook your digital camera up to it very easy....
You will need your computer for photoshop, painter, quark, illustrator, video editing app, aftereffects and sound work. You would need 150 thousand dollars to do all that with an SGI octain, if you even could...
Take all of the money you save and put it into art supplies for your drawing, painting and design classes, and a digital camera, the Nikon coolpix 880 rocks the house...
Also get a CD burner.
Trust me, this would set you up very very well and save you gobs of money.
There is simply no reason for you to stuff tons of dough into a fancy name box, these things last a year or a year and a half before you want to upgrade again.
Also, don't bother with the absolute cutting edge in processor speed, that extra 10% in speed will cost you 1-2 thousand dollars, that money would be much better spent towards a video editing setup like a DPS reality...

cheers,
bayard

Fish Bone Lodge
Animation...
5 Star Cuisine, Cocktails and Dancing Nightly

[jtk77]

good advice....

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[mrme]

Dell Precision

[jack-lemmon]

A student doesn't "need" the level of machine he "wants".

My 16 year old son isn't getting a Porsche for xmas either.
I also could care less if he doesn't wet his pants with excitement over the used Honda he'll be getting instead.

[sumatraxsi]

First Id like to point out Porsche is a great car but man HONDA is great don't be disappointed your son is young he think top line cars are the [Censored] but tell him about HONDA and how you can sup it up like hell man you can change everything in HONDA there great cars.

Okay I have made my decision Im making a Custom made Computer I already Have a CD burner I have the New Jaz 2G external drive so I can use those in there.
This is my decision I made alot of your opinions reaqlly Helped me alot so phase one is out of the way Phase 2 will be building it first id like to point out this I really appreaciate all the input and help, we all know in the future its all gonna be linux anyway its the smartest move by softimage to go with linux over macOSX Macs are good computers my brother is a Graphic Designer first year in collage decided to go to conestoga over sheridan I don't know why but oh well he dosn't do almost any computer work in the first year but he does work at home he recently bought the G4Cube very nice.
So now its mine turn to get one Id like to also point out SGI is great but lets face it IRIX is mostly for networks and thats why studios get them I will be learnig those on the side to but I decided to custom build my computer I will be doing the 64bit processor indeed but will it be Intenium or AMD 64 bit is undecided Also this will take some time to build so if people keep helping me telling me things that are good and up to date will be great I will be attending Siggraph 2001 I was at 2000 in New Orleans.
I will build a good tower and with the rest of the money I will buy A WACOM tablet and probably a second monitor cause i will be running maya and XSI then when i got the perfect computer that i can afford and suits me I will install XSI and MAYA new versions cause i will be updating new versions from journey ed all the time a new one comes out this is great I also decided custom build cause ill be able to update my computer when needed not every year just when needed and the software asks for it. I have a major book collection at home on maya and what softimage has thank GOD XSI books are coming this year i already heard about 4 books for XSI. I also have alot of books on Character animation cause that the majority on what i want to do is Character Animation also books on anatomy.

I am also doing custom build computer cause of other apps i want on it like corel or photoshop Flash.
sure i can put those on this compute but still so let phase 2 begin it won't be quick but everyone intrested in keeping me up to date and helping me with my custom computer can go to Maya or XSI Forum in General under PHASE 2 (Custom) I am intrested in 64 bit Proccesors ofcourse so this will be a long research for me im sure alot of people think ill be taking to long but i will be learning on other computers in school collage communities and reading books but I really want my own workstations and i don't want to be making mistakes so l8r versions won't suffer and i won't have to update my hardware that much every year or 3. so who ever is intrested in helping me with my custom computer go to PHASE 2 (Custom). in the forum Maya General or XSI General.
So far I already have a Jaz 2G External disk storage and a Yamaha 6x4x16 CD-Burner.

[guille-lavin]

Dude,
If you can wait then you should buy a computer that runs Linux.A/W is supposed to release a new version of Maya that is for Linux from what i've read in the past 6 months.It's scheduled for release about the same time as OSX Maya.

It should be a great system as Linux is very stable and almost has the same compatibility next to Windows NT.Linux is more stable than NT.

To check out the current trends with 3D on Linux a good website you can visit is http://www.linuxartist.orghttp://www.linuxartist.org

Also, you can run Linux on the 64-bit Alpha processors but it isn't certain if A/W will have Alpha supported for their Linux version of Maya.

Just my thoughts.

[edit to add:]

SGI has linux workstations too based on some new graphics chipsets.You should look into those and get the highest-end model in that series with a 21" monitor.That would be my final choice.

[mrme]

First of all you need to rely on something/someone besides this msg board to do your thinking for you. It is very obvious that you do not know much about computers or graphic applications. I know that you are young and just starting out. That is a good thing. However you need to realise that the applications you are speaking of are not for newbies. Neither are the types of machines you are talking about.

My advice to you is to go out and buy as many books on computers, networks, and Operating systems as you can find. Then go out and purchase a copy of 3dmax or lightwave, and plenty of books for it. Once you can build your own computer and install your own operating system on it, install one of those 2 applications. Then begin your learning.

If your machine costs you more than 3grand you have some serious problems. I just cant see a newbie blowing more than 3 grand on a workstation. For 3 grand you can have a 1 ghz machine with plenty of fast storage and loads of ram.

Now I dont know why you started throwing around the idea of an Itanium or Sledgehammer. Let me give you a little background on these processors. First of all they are 64bit. Im sure you dont havea clue as to what that means. Well it means that they will ONLY run a 64 bit OS. That means that there is no operating system that they will run on currently. They are having to develop one. The 64bit processors will be aimed at only the high end server market when they are first released. It would be futile to purchase one for graphic applications since NONE of the software will run on it.

Please go do some research before you come in here asking silly questions. You do not impress anyone by throwing around the idea that you have lots of money to spend, it only makes you look silly and uneducated. For your own good please go out and search, scour the internet for information. That is why it is here. You have some good advice to get you started now run along and frolic in your new found knowledge.

[guille-lavin]

Sun Micro's latest developed version of their OS is 'Itanium ready'.However, Intel and AMD are waiting on Microsoft for the 64bit Whistler OS, it is believed by some sites.

64bit in a workstation is very common for large data sets that require it's memory addressing space capability.

32bit apps wont take advantage of the architecture but they will still run alongside the new 64bit apps for those who need it.

[mrme]

32 bit applications do not currently run on the itanium.

it is not backward compatible end of story. go read it anywhere on the internet or in print...

the sledgehammer will be backward compatible, but whistler will not run on the AMD chipset, so of course youre going to have to find an os that will run on amd's new chip and make all the software compat with it.

yes many applications would benifit from the itanium technology, however they all have to be re-written and complied to run on the new OS and make all the new calls to completely new registers and instruction sets in the completely new 64 bit arc. Since there is no current and widely available 64bit os to test the itanium and new programming on... most developers are left out in the cold. I know this for a fact because I work closely with someone who gets to play with this new technology every day.

As far as Sun being able to run on the itanium? Who cares... How many home users and graphic artists are running solaris or some other unix/sun developed flavor of os?

Whistler will be a multiversion package OS like W2k. there will be personal, prof, server and advanced server versions. Only the server and or advanced server versions will be 64bit Itanium /McKinally ready. And anything running on those will NOT BE COMPATIBLE with 32 bit code. Microsoft has made this abundantly clear.

Whistler is all about moving everything towards the net. net based applications etc. net biz, net infastructures etc.

and i think i did state that the itanium is going to be a server proc when introduced. whats sun's market ? ummm ok !

[maos52]

Cool, over fifty posts on this one, never seen that before.
I'm just glad this guy isn't blowing away his 20k for a sgi/nt or something like that.

My last cent for this one...

Maos.

[djfluid]

in reply to mrme posts

"werd"

[che-1]

Back in 1996 i bought a deskstation raptor reflex 433 mhz alpha workstation to run softimage 3d for nt for U$15 k and a pentium 200 mhz for photoshop,after effects, etc...
My friends was using pentium 200 and they said that i was crazy spending all this money just for studing. Four years later i'm graduated with my own company and a lot of work.
My friends are working in the same place they were 4 years ago doing just crap work like fliyng logos in max while i'm doing cool animations in maya and softimage like character animation, virtual sets and 3d video(with polarized glasses).
The point is, if you can buy the fastest machine today even if people tell you that you don't need it, you should do so, because your learning process will be much faster than your competition, so you will be getting much more money then they will in less time.
I would go for the lastest intel processor, with nt os, as much ram as you can buy and the fastest graphic like gloria 3 or wildcat and a god and large sony monitor.Two monitors are great for after too.

[jtk77]

damn .. you can buy a god too ? Sorry had to put that in..
I agree with you on gettting thebest you can . I blew all my monye from work since I was 16 on a good computer .. like 5 grand . that was a lot for me . and I learned far mroe and faster than tring to rely on a out of the store consumer box to build my demo reel. Trying to deal with comptuer tie and waiting your turn at school just doesn't help you learn at all. Good for it , just don't sit around and wait tooooo long for the next mecha of computers .Pick somthing and start creating . If you ahve to rely on a 20000 comptuer to create awsome art , you may have to take your computer into most jobs becouse they will probably be using sothing int he 5 000 mark

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[cyphre]

Yes having the best computer is very nice. And yes it's great when theres not enough computers at your school for everyone. But I will not believe that just cause you buy a 20k computer that your going to make it in this business. I have seen the best work come from people that work at school. You'll find that you end up relying too much on yourself when you work at home all the time. Unless you are going to have no life. Read everything that comes thru here, read all the news and tutorials, ect, or else your going to find yourself slackin off. Yes there are people out there that can do that, but not everyone. Anyways, working along side other people at school is going to help you learn faster cause other people have either faced the problems you have or just have played with it more to help you.
So research a school. Make sure they are 1st and foremost a good school, then make sure they are spending money to upgrade and add more computers so everyone can work. Get a good computer but work a lot at school. Use your computer mostly for rendering so you don't use resources that someone else might need at school.
Plus you have to think. Most people end up changing majors during college. If you buy the best right now, then decide to be a life guard or a person that cleans elephants your out all that money. I mean I would get out of this business in a second if the porn industry needed me.

Cyphre

[pete865]

Wow, quite a thread! cant't leave without posting something myself .. Anyway, I agree totally with the general consensus of "build a PC (NT/win2k)" for student work. If you have $20k to spend, I would suggest dual pIII 1ghz, 1024mb ram (almost as importiant as a good video card) Wildcat 4110, 21 monitor. Make sure its a regular monitor too, dont get tempted by LCDs, they are not as great as everyone thinks (yet), The 1600sw is ok because of its high pixle density, but having discreet pixles like that just doesn't look good imo.

Also, I would like to shead a little bit of light on the UNIX/IRIX ramblings. Windows is most certanly NOT taking over networking, in any way shape or form (at last as far as this industry is concerned, but in most cases, in general). Windows has taken over the Workstation market, Fast, Cheap, boat loads of options, the end. One exception may be smaller houses that employ NT render farms.

IRIXs power comes in its scalability, ie,

1024 processor Origin 3000 anyone?? (as to NTs 8, win2kdcs 16, and if you can find the hardware, win2kdcs 32.)
XFS file system that can support up to 18 million terabytes (18 petabytes..)?? (as to NTs 2 terabyes)
Realtime playback of multiple uncompressed "Film" resolution streams? (as to NTs, yea you wish)

Quite a joke of an OS indeed...

Point being, saying something along the lines of "its a windows wanna be" Immediately pegs you as a moron, cause there are quite a number of people that know what they are talking about on highend3d.com. Now don't get me wrong, Win is the way to go for Workstations. I am a very loyal SGI user, and not even I would buy an octane over the latest PC technology (Unless of course, money was no object, then I would stock up on all kinds of neet SGI hardware But there is some ignorance about IRIX floating around, and I just wanna make sure there is no mis-information. IRIX is still a technologically superior OS to NT and SGI Hardware still costs too much. I sometimes wonder how fast an Origin 3000 with 512 R12,000 1.5ghz 64bit cpus with 50gb ram would render.. sigh too bad MIPS chips havn't broken 600mhz yet, :.

Now for a few nit picks, a DOS prompt resembles a unix shell. NT, faster networking? Since when do NT boxes support multiple FDDI or HIPPI interfaces, and can sustain 15gbps internal bandwidth to feed them? (BTW, there is a fast UNIX network that most people know about, its called the Internet). You don't just pay for a name when you buy a system from SGI or Intergraph (or Dell, IBM, HP for that matter) You pay for support. With SGI, if your under support (which you get when you buy a new system) and something breaks, they overnight the part to you free, and you send the broken one back.

Next, I have heard through the grape vine (ie. from someone at A|W) that Maya OSX has taken a back burner to the Linux port, or to put it another way, the Linux version will be out first, so don't hold your breath for it. It WILL be at least 8/10 months before we see hide or hair of Maya OSX. The reasones are simple, and I have elaborated on them befor, Linux uses X-11, IRIX uses X-11, plop IRIX source code to Linux box, spend sevral months tweeking, server chilled. Where as OSX uses Aqua,Carbon etc, every single UI call in all 25 million lines/30,000 source code files of Maya would have to be changed. The NT port of Maya started at v1.5, and "just recently" (version 2.5 or 2.0, can't remeber) has the UI functionality in the NT and IRIX versions become the same, point being, porting to Aqua will not be any easier then Win32 GUI, allthough, being that OSX is UNIX, there will be significanlty less stuff to worry about, still not as easy as Linux would be. To sum it up, no Mac is not a viable choice for highend 3D, nor will it be any time soon, end of story, oh wait, I forgot, all the best video cards will only be available on mac soon, and they will "dust" everything else.. hello?

In closing, this is a reply to the thread, and is not directed at any one person.

[blk]

just wanted to throw in it was my understand that maya for NT and Irix were being developed pretty much the same time if you watch the makeing of bingo video the money guy was amde with as they say the beta version of Maya on NT which was also when they were doing the beta version of Maya for irix

[stuartscanlon]

A few things to keep in mind about the port. First, remember that at the end of the day, Maya runs inside of MEL. You do not port Maya per se, you port MEL and then as you say tweak and serve chilled. Also, you point out that NT and Unix did not reach parity until several versions after they started releasing at 1.5. While this is true, we still had a v1.5 to work with on NT did we not? Why would the same thing not happen in Mac development?

Also, regarding video cards. If you read my post again you will find I said that when Maya is released for OSX you will have a GVX equivalent as well as a next gen Wildcat. You will also read that I said that these 2 cards 'dust' what most of the folks on this board use: nvidia, gloriaII, etc.. Do you disagree with my assertion that a Wildcat 'dusts' a gloriaII?

Personally, I would prefer to return to using Maya on IRIX. But as you point out, MIPS at the affordable level just aint keepin up with Intel. That being the case, I look forward to either Linux or OSX such that I can get away from an OS that needs to be burned down every 6 months. NT just does not cut it in a production environment.

cheers

have a lovely day

[pete865]

Yes, everything is based around MEL, but how does MEL calling a UI function differ from calling one directly, other then the obviouse advantage that you only need to port 1 "Open a window" call, which of course makes everything a hell of alot easier, but from my experience, it would still seem to be a hell of a task. As for the older NT versions, sure they worked, kinda (yes, I don't like NT, but I deal with it cause I do like Wildcat). And I think the exact same thing will happen on mac. IMO Linux will get a full Unlimited port very soon for the simple fact that its a 100% POSIX compliant SystemVr4 UNIX OS, as is IRIX and also because the A|W high dollar customers want Linux, PDI for example has their own modified Linux kernel running workstations with their proprietary compositing software (or some type of 2d software, can't recall), and tons of places have Linux render farms now. Open GL cards are there, not free, $179 for a GVX210 Xi Graphpics X server, but thats not a hell of alot to ask when the OS is free.

As for this dusting issue, I see now that you were just responding to all the rants about their being no 3d cards, Which IMO is silly, there is no choice (meaning, no choice but to make them, if indeed A|W is really serious about this port), if Apple and Alias ever want to sell a seat of Maya OSX, their will NEED to be nice cards. I'm sure there has been some form of commitment from some vendor along the line, or else I doubt Alias would be porting at all.

Yea, it's very sad that MIPS/IRIX is so far behind in the workstation market, truely innovative stuff at the time.. And you will get no argument from me about NT being a dog, it just is. But like any dog, if you train it right, it can be a trusty companion (It's one of those annoying little dogs that likes to pee on the carpet and attack your ankles). As for it not cutting it in a production enviroment, I honestly have no IDEA where you got that one from.. Go spend $7 and see the movie of your choice, double or nothing ALL platforms were invloved at some point (As every damn movie there is, is cut on Avid Film composer), and Intergraph became the leader in the highend 3d workstation market for a reason, they sold alot of their computers and had Wildcat. Since they were sold at a still premium price, it's safe to assume that they are (never mind the fact that they are), and have been sucessfully employed in highend production for some time. An interesthing thing to know would be which version (NT/IRIX) has the most seats "sold" (every wannabe 3d artist and their unkle has a pirate version of Maya NT). It would probably be the same... Anyway, Happy Holidays!

[replicand]

Etk,
It's not like they have to go through all 25 million lines translating things...

Any application of that size absolutely must be well defined, with specific blocks of code (or blocks of files) each doing one thing only.

For a project that large to be successful, it would have to be handled similar to how Quake3 was made... everything that goes on beneath the surface is programmed not to be dependant on any non-standard libraries, and the great majority of that code simply requires a recompile.

This means that any updates to that part of the code is trivial to move across to the other platforms.

Every single UI call would be very distinctly kept grouped together, and in a program that size, would only make up a tiny fraction of the overall code.

When porting to a new platform, you only need to port the lowest level stuff (such as reading to/from files) and the UI, which really doesn't add up to much in those 30,000 files.

In short: it's not as bad as it sounds. For a project that size to ever work they would have needed to kept very scrict control of the design of the project, and a well thought out design makes rewriting a UI [relativly] simple, as all that code is grouped into a known subset of files.

And, Cocoa excels at making UI construction easy and quick, far more than any other framework that I know of. When you get to doing low level stuff, such as a 3d renderer, you still have to do that all yourself, so Cocoa doesn't help so much there... but your only porting the UI.

Porting the UI to OS X should be a LOT easier than going to NT. Of course, it's still 25mil lines of code/30k files. Still a momumental task, but not nearly as bad as you made it sound (: