What would you recommend for a computer to do animation with Poser 11... or specs.. roughtly in the 1000 - 1500 range.

Now that we have hardware-assisted rendering via SuperFly and GPU, you need to further qualify your interest. Photorealistic animation or cartoonish?

half and half really. More towards Anime style.

Hmm. I'm not the most qualified to answer but no one else is chiming in yet. I think if you want realism, you want GPU and SuperFly. If you want anime and tricky toon shading, you want CPU and FireFly.

That argues for two very different computers. One that spends $1000 on GPU and $500 on the rest with tons of video RAM, the other that spends $1500 on maximum CPU power, no GPU at all (except whatever it comes with for free) and a modest amount of system RAM.

I would suggest an I-Core 5 or higher for your processor, lots of wattage on your power supply unit (more than the bare minimum to run your processor), a super good video card for those superfly renders, and as BB said, LOTS of RAM.

Well, believe it or not I'd probably ask first what sort of system you already have, and if you find it meets your needs for rendering except for the animati9on. The reason I ask, rendering does rely pretty heavily on the video card, but the real heavy lifting I've found when it comes to animation is actually the amount of processing power you have available that seems to make the biggest difference.

When I did video animation I found that an older file server with a ton of processors actually would out perform my even my I7 with a top of the line video card when it came to producing video animation sequences in poser. I was using an IBM 455 with 16 dual core 2.2 GHZ processors for the task, worked like a charm even though the video in a rack mount file server is very limited (pretty much just standard VGA, they aren't really designed for gaming, etc..)

I picked mine up used for a song and replaced the single core 2 ghz with dual core 2.2 ghz, giving me an effective 32 cores running at 2.2 ghz to handle the animation process. Worked great. However I don't recommend this be a primary machine or as a replacement for a PC, about all it was really good for was animation because of it's other limitations. So if you have a good fast machine with a decent video card in it that's doing you fine for everything else, and just want some more horsepower for animation, this might be a viable option. If you don't already have a desktop that's meeting your other needs, I'd probably do as the others have suggested and look at a good I5 or I7 machine with a decent video card and a good amount of ram.

On the file server route, please note that an older rack mount file server is a big, ungainly beast that does suck down a lot of juice. I stored mine in the basement, had it setup on the network and remote desktop into it as needed, I'd shut it down when not in use to save on the electric bills. .

I use a similar strategy as TRobbins; used rackmount blades seem to run forever and cost about two cents on the dollar of what they cost new.

Used Dell C1100 blade, with dual X5650 Xeon processors (24 total render threads @ 2.66GHz) and 48GB RAM, $650 US, free shipping. I've measured the actual power consumption while they were rendering at 100% CPU capacity and fans spinning fast; 275W. That's well less than half of what one of my dual-Xeon workstations will draw when rendering.

If you only get one or two blades, you can just set them on a shelf or milk crate; once I got more than four, I bought a rack for them. A rack is a convenience, not a necessity.

I installed one small HD, and got an OEM WIN7Pro license (about $72 then, but getting pricier now), and each blade emulates a desktop. Another option would be to run Linux on the blades and send a boot file to each blade from your controlling workstation via your network (PiXiE boot). A third option is to run maybe three blades as one virtual machine using VMware.

If you go the server blade route, then spend the remainder of your budget for a GPU for the workstation, like a 6GB GTX980Ti, $660 plus $7shipping. Remember that for Superfly, only CUDA-capable cards can serve for GPU acceleration.

Now, if you don't judge your current desktop to be competent, then you might want to browse eBay for the large-scale refurb dealers who sell used professional workstations. Use the following search terms to narrow in on machines with dual HyperThreaded hex-core Xeons:

2x X5650, 2x X5660, 2x X5670, 2x X5680, 2x X5690. In Xeon nomenclature, X is high performance, L is a balance between performance and economy, and E is the low performance energy saver.

You might also de-clutter the search results by adding the terms T7500 (Dell's full tower chassis) or z800 (HP's full tower chassis). The mid-tower chassis are T5500 and z600, but these will have fewer RAM slots and fewer expansion card slots. I have a z600 (named Urania); she has dual X5660 Xeons (24 render threads @2.8GHz) and 48GB RAM. She cost $1,260 US, to my mind that's a good bang for the buck.