1.47GHz Athlon
1024MB DDR RAM
GeForce 4 TI4200 (LeadTek)
…the network render button is helpful as well 
two durons doing nothing most of the time
What i’m much more interested is not exact specs, but WHERE did you get computer(s). In my case i had to bring my computer each meeting to school (since the school computer could barely run the program), which nearly destroyed it (unpugging and reattaching everything 10 times a week is not a good thing)
Did most of you just used their home computers and worked at home?
Wha? That’s insane. Why didn’t you just have the people come to your house and use the computer there?
last year we had a bunch of POS computers from our sponsor. this year however…
we willhave at least 3 computers possibly 4 with more than a gig of DDR ram. those same computers will all be runnning GEforce 4 graphics cards and have kick *ss proccessing power. our fourth computer is maybe going to be bought by our sponsor. in addition we will have 2 render farms. Our first will be at our school using computer that were just given to out robotics teacher from our sponsor, and some other computers that were given to the saem teacher as part of his computer lab. this means maybe 15+ operation computers all hooked together in a render farm. Our second render farm will include everyone’s personal computers all hooked together at someone’s house. We are expecting rendering to go much faster this year.
as for where we got them. we checked with our sponsor first, and they gave us a bunch of old machines. they aren’t top of the line but the work. second we all dug into our pockets and fixed our comuters up as well. you may want to try going to a local computer shop and seeing if they have some computers that you can borrow, and if all else fails, ask for one to be put into your team’s budget. A little more funraising could make your work on the animation go a little bit faster.
VERY IMPORTANT. ANY TEAM IN CALIFORNIA OR MICHIGAN OR ANYWHERE ELSE THAT WOULD LIKE TO BE MENTORED BY OUR TEAM PLEASE EMAIL ME. the_direktor@hotmail.com
Err right… and you think I’m on crack?
no man
but you gotta see what we are going to get from our sponsor
if we get a dual Xeon system I would be increadibly surprised… they’re quite expensive
Jack, how do you know we’ll get MAX 4.3 next year? I was looking forwards to MAX 5… looks like it has more realistic lighting… And Discreet says it’s shipping, too.
Also, how do you get sponsors to donate computers? What kinds of sponsors do that? We could use some more… We’ve just done everything at home.
Well, based on these setups, how long did it take to render the whole animation (not counting post editing, only frame rendering) ?
It was about 15 hours in our case.
Wha? That’s insane. Why didn’t you just have the people come to your house and use the computer there?
the problem is that we did modeling on two computers, so either way, someone had to bring his computer somewhere in order to cooperate. Plus it seemed more fun to work where the rest of the team was building robot.
*Originally posted by Suneet *
**Jack, how do you know we’ll get MAX 4.3 next year? I was looking forwards to MAX 5… looks like it has more realistic lighting… And Discreet says it’s shipping, too.**
I thought i read that we would get max 4.3. But if you say that discreet is allready shipping max 5, we might get it. i really don’t know for sure
yeah, our sponsors have a bunch of old machines that they need to get rid of. They actually went as far to say that we can’t bring them back.
for those of you looking for computers
talk to whatever company sponsors you
our team is sponsored by Haworth. they make furniture. so most of the people there are not computer oriented. but we talked to someone in charge of the computer systems and found a bunch of computers. all that anyone would have to do is find the head of technology explain your situation, and i’m sure they’ll have something for you. if in doubt or you don’t have any real sponsor go to a big company in your area. i’m sure they’d be willing to help.
ANY TEAM THAT WANTS TO BE MENTORED THIS UP COMING SEASON OUR TEAM WOULD BE HAPPY TO HELP. GIVE ME AND EMAIL @ the_direktor@hotmail.com
my school just got a new cad lab… 20 some odd xeon 2.0ghz with 512 megs of dual channel rdram each 
i’m hoping they’ll let me set up netrender… it’d fly if not, we’re stuck rendering on the lead animator’s 1.8 ghz 
i’m working on getting my mentor to let me set up netrender… he’s the cad teacher also, so its like its his computers and he’s worried i’m gonna mess up the comps… but 20+ XEON 2GHZ!!! AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH
holy jesus, thats a lot of expensive machines. Our moronic school is in the midst of a deficit, so our computers are junk.
Heh. I doubt if I added up all of the megahertz in the robotics network it would come up to 2ghz Most of the computers can’t run anything but Windows 95 (anything being Windows OS of course…).
I think we make it to some where around 5 or 6GHz… lol
Oh yeah… Xeons suck 
huh? How do Xeons suck? With the current technology, their pretty much the best we have for animation.
Xeons are actually quite inferior to the Athlon MP in animation…
we have 50 comps networked in the school district in our tech center (sucky ping though) and there P3 1.0 with 128 mb ram, but we have two independant comps that are AMD 1800+xp’s (i think thats 1.62 Mgz) with 512 ddr ram, dvd-rw (the one great thing about the comps) and a geforce 2 at 64 mb (that sucks) the funny part is that if i network render, is that it is just as quick to do it on the two that are faster and not connected. then to do it on 25 of the ones that are cause of the ping, which has to be sent to the administrations building and back.
It still sucks though, but the school district bought me a geforce 3 64 mb, I’m hoping for a Geforce 4 128mb this year (never know)
I’m building a new system for myself which I will be using on our animation team. 2x AMD Athlon MP 2000, 1024MB ECC DDR RAM, Geforce 4 TI4600, 80GB HD, Aluminum case with 3 blue windows(meh! :P), 2 12" neon lights, 40x12x48 burner, 16x DVD
[/brag]