Recently I have been struggling with projects in Maya 2013 on my home PC and that lead me to take a hard look at my system and the software that I use. First I will tell you that there has never been a lot of money available for me to purchase a high end workstation, so I have always been forced to cobble together whatever I could afford along the lines of hardware. That being said I will lay out for you the specs of the system I am currently running.
Base System: HP XW6200 Workstation.
Specifications:
- Processor: Dual Xeon 2.8 (single core)
- DVD drive read and write
- Hard Drive: 78gig Western Digital Caviar SATA 7200 rpm
- Hard Drive 2: Seagate 120 gig 7200 rpm
- RAM: 4 Gigabytes
- Video: Nvidia Quadro FX380 LP 512 ram
- Sound: Onboard sound
- OS: Microsoft XP Pro 32 bit
So that makes the system I'm using almost 10 years old, or you could say at least 8 years out of date. The workstation came from ebay and only cost me $139.00 delivered, I added an additional two gigs of ram for 25 bucks and the vidio card I added to replace the nvidia Quadro 280 NVS that had only 64mb of memory.
The new card cost me around 80.00 at Micro Center in 2012. Total cash investment- $244.00 and at the time in 2012 that was $234.00 more than I could afford, but you have to make sacrifices for your dreams, and my dream is to be a working, professional computer animator!
The reason I had to foot the bill on a new system was because the custom built black beauty that I had built back in 2002 when I was attending the Art Institute had suffered a catastrophic failure in 2009 and I didn't have the five hundred bucks to fix what was originally a three thousand dollar machine. At the end of 2011 after being without an animation computer for 2 years a friend took pity on me and gave me an old HP pavillion he had and I was back in business. I scrounged the cash for an internet connection and leaned full tilt at animating. I joined the 11 second club with the intention of building my skillset but was quickly shut down when the 9 year old HP pavillion I was working on began to glitch and then died in the middle of my first entry, forcing me to migrate the data to the newly purchased HP XW6200 in order to complete my entry, which still came out looking poorly executed and showcasing how much I still had to learn about being an animator.
2012 brought more financial hardship. The bill on my Bachelor degree in Animation from the Art Institute was crushing me, and the small vending company I was working for was suffering so my wages were reduced, shortly after that and I ended up without a job and couldn't find another one for 9 months. My degree was worthless in the Denver local job market and the first job offer I got at the end 2012 had absolutely nothing to do with animating, but I have a family to provide for and bills to pay, so as I moved from 2012 into 2013 my dreams slipped farther away as my responsibilities stepped in.
All the while in 2013 I was drawing in pencil, painting in oil, and scheming about how I could get another internet connection and rejoin my quest for animation employment, I upgraded my software from Maya 2007 to a student version of Maya 2013, that was a world of difference. I discovered the Unity engine and bought a book about it because I wanted to understand how the animation cycles I produced in Maya were used by the game engine. In college they never teach you what happens to the animation after you create it, in fact, there is very little information provided on how you can be an effective game animator and function in the pipeline. So I figured that if I could produce animation cycles that were game ready, then test them in a real game environment myself, then I would have value to a prospective employer because I understood the process and could execute accordingly.
In late 2013 while rigging a character I intended to bring into either Unity or the Unreal Engine, I found myself spending far too much time looking for tutorials online and I had exhausted the information contained in my small collection of Gnomon and Digital Tutors CD collection, I needed to learn more and I needed it fast because I only have 2 to 4 hours a day during the week to work on animating related tasks, and sometimes a full saturday and sunday, but as I'm sure you know, animation, rigging, lighting, rendering, they all eat away the hours in a day so I don't have time to waste combing the internet for what I need to know now.
Well that is when I decided to join Digital Tutors on a monthly subscription basis and I will tell you straight up, that that was probably one of the best things I have done for my animation career in years. Anytime I need a question answered, I can almost guarantee that I can find it on DT, and I have been listening too and learning from the same group of tutors for years, so I know their approach to the material and their workflow, making it easier to follow along. Also, as the years have passed, the library of available material and software covered has exploded, I am so thankful for all that Digital Tutors provides that I could never say enough about them. This is coming from someone who spent close to six years at community colleges and private college and has a Bachelors of Arts in animation from the Art Institute, with literally thousands of hours of lecture time and project time, and tens of thousands of dollars spent, and I think that Digital Tutors rivals or surpasses any classroom instruction I ever received, and costs me a fraction of what I gave the Art Institute.
That brings me back to where I sit now in 2014, typing this blog entry on a Sunday afternoon in January before the Broncos playoff game. We were looking at computing and software in the beginning of this article, looking at the specs of one of my two HP XW6200 machines, thats right, I said TWO!
You see, I was so proud of the machine I had purchased, and it had so profoundly enhanced my computing experience that I would go around talking to my co-workers and acquaintances about it, I would sing the praises of my workstation and share my enthusiasm about being able to work in Maya again, but keep in mind that my day job has absolutely nothing to do with animation or being an artist for that matter, so mostly people just shrug of my conversation as something that weird artist guy talks about, I say mostly because at one point, my enthusiastic comments took a surprising turn. One gentleman who I was chatting with about computers and the benefits of a workstation versus a consumer desktop, walked me around the corner of his warehouse where there was piled up a mass of monitors and towers being scrapped and recycled from the financial institution he worked for, and right there in front was a single HP XW6200 Workstation, just like the one I had at home. Well as I'm sure you are aware the HP XW series comes in many configurations, but right there was what appeared to be a twin to my workstation at home. Immediately I asked the guy what he intended to do with the machines and he said this was the last load of equipment that he had to get rid of and that the truck would be there later that day, where they would simply toss all the gear in the back of the open truck bed and drive off to who knows where. My heart began to race, and I blurted out "Would you mind if I threw that computer in the back of my van?" and to my surprise he said "take what you want, ain't no one gonna miss it" I swept that tower up in my arms and escorted it to my van, that was at least 9 months ago, and that tower sat in my home, next to my desk until about a week ago, when I was suffering some issues with the display of the graff editor while working on a walk cycle for a game character.
My frustration with the issue was building and even up until this moment I have not been able to resolve it, and its three weeks since I first encountered this problem. Well that is what drove me to thinking about that tower sitting on the floor, I picked it up and laid it on its side on the dining room table behind my desk, I pulled the latch on the side cover and cracked it open to have a look inside. the very first thing that stood out at me was a massive graphics card sitting in the PCIe slot, I leaned sideways to peer at the fan cover underneath and the hairs stood up on the back of my neck, I even let out a squeaky giggle, right there staring at me was the black face of an Nvidia Quadro FX3800 I swear that I have not felt that sort of rush of excitement in a long time. Next, I spied the hard drive bay and thought something was amiss, the drive tray contained a single, dinky little box with the power and SATA cables connected to it. I grasped the levers and slid the thing out, it said Samsung Solid State Drive! Well what the hell is that? I thought, I replaced the drive tray and pulled one of the four ram sticks, I gig it read and all the others were identical, so this machine had the same amount of ram that my current system had and from experience I knew that 4 gigs of ram with XP Pro service pack three only registered as 3.5 gigs to the OS, but I was anxious to see if the machine would boot, I slipped off to the storage pallet outside where wrapped in triple layers of visqueen I have the carcasses of my previous two machines. I pulled the power chord from Black Betty, my Black Antec cased Dual AMD opteron custom build from my college days, a machine who will always hold sentimental value to me, and whom I intend to one day enshrine in my future home studio.
I returned to the house and seated the workstation next to my purring current machine. Then I was off to Office Max where I hoped to find a KVM switch and a new mouse and keyboard because the ten year old model I was currently using had no numbers pad and the corded mouse was slow and glitchy. Thats where I ran into another sweet deal, the logitech wireless keyboard and mouse that was on markdown for the Christmas rush was out of stock, the model was originally $65.00 but was on sale for $29.00. When I asked the cashier if they had more in the back, he asked the manager over the radio and the manager met me in the isle where he said that they seemed to be fresh out. Then this skinny, nerdy, pocket protector wearing young man heroically solved the issue, he reached forward and grabbed the Logitech MK550 that retailed for $89.00, well beyond my modest means, and extended it towards me saying " I'll give you this unit in place of the one we are short, at the same sale price of $29.00, Merry Christmas?" with that my eyes welled up and I turned away out of embarrassment, choked up I muttered "thank you so much!" that really meant a lot to me and I will always be sure to take my business to that store.
The KVM switch I purchased at an incredible $19.99 and I was out the door with a few dollars to spare, of course I had to get permission from my wife before I could buy, and she supported me fully, only to unwrap one of my gifts from her later that week on Christmas day, a wired USB keyboard by Logitech. My wife told me that she had already purchased and wrapped the gift, but when I called her and she could hear the excitement in my voice and especially the deal I was gonna get, she could not tell me no, I love that woman!
Once I returned home and picked up my two boys from grandmas house, things got in the way and it was literally days before I was able to get all of the hardware connected and powered up, thats when the icing topped the cake. I had been running XP pro 32bit since I built my first animation computer in 2002, thats before there was such a thing as 64 bit systems. When I came to the welcome screen of the new XW6200, after s successful boot, I was looking at a version of windows I didn't recognise, I found my way from the start tab to the control panel to look at the system specs, all the while the fan of the Quadro FX 3800 whirred next to me, a distraction but not overwhelming. Under the systems tab I found this
Specs:
- Processor: Dual Xeon 3.2 (single Core)
- RAM: 4 gigs and all registered.
- OS: Windows Pro 64 Bit
- DVD: Light Scribe R/WR
- Hard Drive: 120 Gig Samsung EVO 840 with 111 gig available
- Graphics: Nvidia Quadro FX3800 1gig ram
Installing was a breeze, even though this took place over a period of about a week. Then came my first session in Maya on the new system ( new to me, even though its older than some of my children) and what a pleasure, I flew through the boot process, files opened almost instantly, and viewport response has been like nothing I have known. I do not use a computer at work, and like I said, XP is all I have used since I moved over from an apple running OS 10 when I was studying graphic design in community college, before that I was running Windows 95 on a Gateway since it came out, in 1995. Windows 7 Pro is impressing me every day!
Back to the reason I started to take a hard look at my hardware, the graff editor problem, the new system did not solve the issue here is a link to the blog where I describe and show the issue : http://animexplor.blogspot.com/p/blog-page.html
But now I am finishing the walk cycle with the current version of the soldier rig, then I will start over with the new rig where I have parented the gun to the soldier without using referencing. If you are interested, watch for the post and new video where I hope to resolve this issue.
To all the animators and prospective animators out there who read this post, thanks for taking the time, I know your time is valuable. In closing, as always, my hope is that somewhere in here you found something you can relate too, or something you can use.
No comments:
Post a Comment