Crappiest Rendering Computer

[Trashed20]

What is the crappiest rendering computer you have?

I render mine on my 400 celeron with win 98 and 256 mb ram and a 4 gb hd

[Rabid Robots]

In my old 3d animation class, befroe the school got new computers, I had to use a P100 with 64megs of ram. Come to think of it, I have no idea how the program could even start

[Jay5780]

At work I render on a Dual G4 with a Gig of RAM and in After Effects ir renders sooooooooooooo slooooooooooow. Dang huh?

[Jack]

Originally posted by Jay5780
At work I render on a Dual G4 with a Gig of RAM and in After Effects ir renders sooooooooooooo slooooooooooow. Dang huh?

What? - Well i could see if you have tons of raytraces and stuff like that. But, for a single computer, thats quite fast. The only better thing would be a room of 30 of them (does anyone say 'net render'?)

[Marc P.]

Has anyone seen Wierd Al in the movie UHF? Anyone remember the dream sequence where he falls asleep and dreams of a bunch of things in a 3d environment? Given the date of the movie and avaliable hardware, what could have been used for that? It's all squares and cubes, and was probably cutting edge for it's day, but does anyone have any idea what it was done with?

[MattK]

Originally posted by Marc P.
Has anyone seen Wierd Al in the movie UHF? Anyone remember the dream sequence where he falls asleep and dreams of a bunch of things in a 3d environment? Given the date of the movie and avaliable hardware, what could have been used for that? It's all squares and cubes, and was probably cutting edge for it's day, but does anyone have any idea what it was done with?

Yeah that must have taken some work!

[Chris Nowak]

ummm...probably the old massive SGI workstations...those were incredibly expensive but could get the job done. Either that or just some talented artists.

Oh yeah, our crappiest computer that we've had to render on has been my old 300mhz AMD K6.

[Marc P.]

to answer the original question, i've rendered on a pentium 233 laptop with 96 megs of ram and a 2.1 gig hard drive with windows 2000.

[Jay5780]

Originally posted by Jack


What? - Well i could see if you have tons of raytraces and stuff like that. But, for a single computer, thats quite fast. The only better thing would be a room of 30 of them (does anyone say 'net render'?)

I know it is a "fast" machine, but it is not reliable. Every time I talk to someone about Macs and they say how great they are I say use it for 20 hours a day 365 days a year and then tell me how great it is. This machine always freezes and crashes and gives dumb memory errors for example after boot up it sometimes says "there is not enough memory to load internet explorer" With a gig or ram there is plenty and yes all the settings are correct.

So with all the problems I changed the voice that says the errors to say "When will you learn and buy a PC?" before it reads the error...

[Kyle Fenton]

Originally posted by Jay5780


I know it is a "fast" machine, but it is not reliable. Every time I talk to someone about Macs and they say how great they are I say use it for 20 hours a day 365 days a year and then tell me how great it is. This machine always freezes and crashes and gives dumb memory errors for example after boot up it sometimes says "there is not enough memory to load internet explorer" With a gig or ram there is plenty and yes all the settings are correct.

So with all the problems I changed the voice that says the errors to say "When will you learn and buy a PC?" before it reads the error...

You may have a messed up system.
I can't really say unless I see the machine.
I have a Beige 233Mhz that is pretty reliable, and I do a bunch of stuff with it.

Do you have Mac OS 9 or Mac OS X?
I would recommend using Mac OS X since After Effects is native to it.

Apple is going to come out with an awesome video compositor, very soon.

Apple has recently purchased Shake, Tremor, Rayz, and Pismo (or at least I think it is Pismo), anyway I think they are going to make one big app combing the power of all of them, which will blow After Effects in the dust.

Originally posted by Trashed20

What is the crappiest rendering computer you have?

I render mine on my 400 celeron with win 98 and 256 mb ram and a 4 gb hd

Do you mean slowest, "crappiest rendering" usually means crappy results in rendering, which unless you have a screwed up system, a slow computer usually gets the job done, but much slower.

I have a 233 MHz that takes about 40-45 minutes to compress about a 4-minute match. Most modern computer can probably compress MPEG-1 or MPEG-4 in real time. So it is basically your patience, and if you are on a deadline. Usually in rendering, you send the job off to many computers, or have it render on a powerful internal server.