If I buy Quadro FX 54,56,5800.. for my 3d Apps (3dsmax, Vue & Zbrush)

What if I buy any of that Quadro FX 5+++, althou i really am tempted to buy FX 5800..


Vue creates very nice landscapes and makes me wonder it could take up to 4-6 million polys to make a vast island with trees, volcanoes, mountains and a small town.

Zbrush can easily build detailed 3d characters, hat if i make 10 of them and let's say each character is 500,000 polys/tris.

3dsmax for some house modeling...lets say about 15 but same look but only different textures. so lets say each house is about 12,000 tris.


here is my question...

1st. Now, let's say i'll import all those objects in 3dsmax for animation,
Will the 3dsmax be able to act smoothly(Zoom, pan, selecting object, moving object, selecting all object then rotating them)?

2nd. the animation is let's say about 3 minutes(volcano erupts, people killing each other and trees waving 45 degrees), if I render them in 3dsmax(Vue Render) how many hours/mins/days will it finish?


Some details:
64bit OS XP
4 Gb ram
Gigabyte mobo
Core 2 duo E8500
1200 watts Power Supply
1 TB Hard Drive
2 of 250gb 2.5 hard drive
and 1 40gb (old) hard drive

oh really, do u know what poly means thou and the render time? Coz i dont think any gaming card is good for 3d apps specially when it comes to detailed characters. Have u tried using any 3d apps on a gaming card? how many polys/tris u can achieve?

If you do this for a living you cannot settle for a gaming card.. The drivers/tech support for a work station card are other worldly as far as proffesional apps go.

Even the lowest end work station card will beat the pants off of a high end gaming card (unless you mod the bios, which doesnt always work..). As far as 3DSmax goes the performance is smoother, the rendering is faster, and it is far more accurate. I'm not sure if you have ever tried to design 3d art on a gaming card but often times (due to poor drivers) as you zoom in and zoom out the textures never seem to line up quite right (they seem to overlap and slide around as the gaming card is made for speed in games, not accuracy in design), makes it very difficult to do anything other than hobby messing around. A proffesional card is much much more accurate in endges and what not.

Now, as for which card you need.. I'm not sure, you will have to ask some people in the field.. Given that you could spend up to 5 grand on a single card, find some experts

http://www.maxforums.org/

Try there, 3dsmax forum. Google probalby knows mroe than me on that front.

try cgtalk.com, they have a hardware specific forum.

Also, if you're going to have a scene in 3Dmax with that many polys and objects, and are worried about the viewport responsiveness, use render proxies (low poly approximations that you see in the viewport but will render as the high-poly object).

That way 3Dmax will be able to handle the scene but you can go wild on poly counts -- just remember to get a good CPU/RAM because those scenes will take forever to render, especially 3 minutes (LONG!!) animation x 24 frames/second.

Also, about character poly counts: most PS3 / XBOX360 games have main characters in the 8-14K tri count. HOWEVER, to build those characters, they will start with a very high-poly version of the character 5+million, and then "bake" that detail onto the 10K low-poly version (basically taking the surface information of the high-poly and converting that into texture information for the low-poly).

Yeah, the typical workflow is:

Low-poly (Base mesh) --> Hi-Poly sculpt --> rebuild Low-Poly (called Retopologizing) --> UV map the new Low-Poly --> generate normal/Occlusion maps with xNormal or within 3Dmax/Maya --> Apply to low-poly.