Animation Performance Machine

[Framed]

Save your money, no matter what hardware you throw at Maya it still won't come anywhere near the performance of Motionbuilder. The problem is with the Maya software. Maybe this level of performance just can't be achieved with a generic 3D package like Maya. Motionbuilder is specifically designed for fast character animation playback so perhaps it's not fair to compair them. Maya has to handle tons of other stuff as well. Someone also suggested that Maya still has pre-historic code (PowerAnimator-Wavefront) and needs to be re-written from scratch - which will never happen unless some radical changes are coming, like 'Discreet Maxaya' :D

[Cronholio]

The reason why you aren't seeing much of a difference is because your CPU is doing most of the work, and the CPUs on those 2 machines aren't all that different. Most GPUs can accelerate skinned meshes in a game context, though there are limits to how many bones you can have per vertex, but 3D apps don't take advantage of this; None that I know of anyway, except maybe Motion Builder. Your CPU is calculating all the expressions in the rig and multiple bones per vertex per frame. The heavier the rig, the more expressions in the rig, the heavier the model the worse performance you will get. You aren't going to see great perfromance increases between a 3.0 Ghz and 3.6 Ghz machine in this respect.

In production the models and sometimes the rigs that the animators work with are usually lower res than what is cooked out for the final shot. An animator on a film will usually work with a low poly segmented model that is linked, not skined, to the rig, and the rig will be free of expressions, bones and controllers that drive the skinned mesh. Once the animation is done, the animation channels on the animation rig are exported onto the high res rig which drives a high res model and the geometry gets cooked out. No one actually works with the high res rig and geometry in their viewport.

[Me109]

Thanks Cronholio and Framed for your replies.. I'm completely think that a high end machine like I described is a waste of time for animation at least anyhow..

Perhaps the only way to get more peformance is to buy the fastest CPU available!

It's interesting that these days a lot of different techniques for rigging and setup are making their way over from film into the games development arena.. The way things are working that for every leap forward in processing speed that the complexity of the art leaps forward also..

I'd love now that Discreet has Alias, and also Motion Builder that they integrate this package into Max.. It would be great if you can go into a 'Animation Mode' like expert mode.. which give you full advantage of the speed of Motion builder and its ability to render a fully shaded (DX9) model..

Sometimes I feel that animators and riggers still have to work around an extremely slow implemention of animation.. in order to acheive somekind of fluid playback.. while the modellers get great performance! Animators need more!! :)

thanks again guys...

[DaForce]

As a side note, the speed increase that you got with the 3.6ghz compared to the 3ghz. Is basically spot on. So you only went about 600mhz, and got roughly a 5FPS or so speed increase, this is what i would expect for that slight mhz increase.
So you got what you paid for in that sense ;-)

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