Thanks - that was the page I saw before - I could not figure out how to get back to it! ;-)

Thanks everybody and congrats to lmuranski and kongorilla

Phil - you should rename that one "A Womb with a View" hehe - nice pics both of you :)

My question after viewing that reel is how much of it was created by Phoul - his animation style is all over that :)

Thanks - I was confused when Sharen said she was ordering Vue Pro but had also ordered Mover 4 - I was not sure if Pro would obsolete Mover or work side by side with it.

Sorry - this has probably been discussed in 8 other threads but to be clear... Vue pro still requires mover for advanced animation features (like poser animation import etc)? and does Vue Pro work with poser 5 (no updates required like 4.2) thanks

Again I may be speaking out of my bum but I think that the GeForce 4 will be quite sufficient. Especially if you are rendering to disk. A better video card is going to make creating the scene quicker (if you have OpenGL turned on) but will not affect rendering when rendering to disk. Of course the 9700pro is pretty sweet and you may have to make an excuse to get it or wait a month or two. Isn't there a 9800 out now? I've been using a laptop lately so I'm out of touch with the latest and greatest upgrades to desktops.

Don't lump me into that category! I have not seen any of the links that you guys are slinging from Apple, IBM or Intel... Where is mightyPete when we need him? We need to get back to the Windows 98SE is better than Windows XP thread :)

Uh oh - now we have a holy war! PAGZone is right that it is kind of like comparing apples to oranges in the fact that the Pentium is a CISC based chip while the PowerPC is RISC based which means that a the same C++ code compiled for PowerPC reduces down to less machine code instructions then if it was compiled for Pentium (I might be talking out of my bum here but I think that is the difference between RISC and CISC) that being said, clock speed is less of an issue when comparing a P4 to a G5. Bus speed is significant too but the diff between 800mhz and 1000mhz is probably pretty negligiable! Still, a benchmark is a benchmark. If you render the same complex Vue scene on a Mac and on a Windows box and get out the stop watch, one will likely be faster than the other. I guess it's all a matter of personal preference - the rest when it gets down to it is just a big pissing contest ! This is coming from a previous hardcore Mac evangelist who has switched to windows although OS X and a G5 is probably a tasty combo :)

I had not seen hyper-threading before - sounds like intel marketing spin :)

hyper threading as they describe it is still different than multi-threading. Multi-threading as we talked about is a function of the OS but more specifically, the programmer has to create their program to use multiple threads. Most windows software, games, art programs etc are written to be multi-threaded - however it is still up to the programmer to implement this...

from what the intel things says, it looks like they have figured out a way to get the chip to process 2 instructions at once which could be pretty cool if it works like they say...

right now a bottle neck with a processor even if it is a nice new P4 3.0 ghz is that it can only do one thing at a time no matter how fast it does it so this would help get around that barrier.

I would check out some sites like
www.tomshardware.com
www.sharkeyextreme.com

they probably are all over this new technology, bench marking it etc to see if it is really worthy.

as far as the render farm, Dale B had a thread a while ago where we discussed the easiest way to make a home network.

My vote is to use a $50 linksys 4 port router - it allows all your computers to connect to each other and the internet and is very easy to set up.

There are some other brands too like NetGear and others that do the same thing and have similar features. I can dig up a link but you should be able to search buy.com or some site like that for 4 port cable modem/DSL router.

Gaz - multi-threading is a function of the operating system aka windows XP vs. windows 3.1 so your old system is as capable as your new one in that regard... You will see a performance increase with the faster processor, faster FSB and DDR memory and 1gb should be quite sufficient and you can always add more later. If you use rendercow and set up your old machine and your new machine to render a scene you should see a pretty good decrease in render time for animations (almost half). For still images it doesn't matter because rendercow sends a full frame at a time so for a single frame it either renders on your main computer or the old one... anyway - throwing extra computer(s) on a render even if they are older systems (like p2 etc) will really help improve your render time

Gebe - I tried that but the sphere looks good horizontal and is still diagnol in the vertical view

Phoul - I would like to see how you track a car or plane - like the camera moves along with a stunt flying plane and then flys ahead. If a plane is too boring, how bout tracking a dragon :)

Speaking of time... I used a free pixelfader set from 3dWorld magazine. I guess it has a lot of polygons cuz it was taking nearly 20 minutes to render one frame. I set up a small camera movement and network rendered overnight using 2 nodes - it only got about 50% done. I decided to kill the render and see how the first half looked... Turns out I lost my camera movement and spent 8+ hours rendering a static image for 70 frames :) Live and learn I guess! Phoul, how many hours do you think it took to render your latest demo reel?

Thanks Dale B and Phoul!

Phoul - a few more questions about your technique if you don't mind sharing...

How big was the model used in the church looking fly through? Do you find that having things larger than normal makes animating easier. I have not tried many sweeping shots but wonder if it's hard to "populate" an area enough that it looks real as the camera pans through.

Also, I was wondering if you use Vue for your explosions or if you use a program like After Effects to do this.