Hardware

Hardware

Ornaments was created on two home-built computers.

Modeling and texturing was done on the following setup:

Pentium 200MHz MMX, 512KB L2 Cache
Diamond FireGL 1000 Pro
128mb EDO RAM
2.1gb Maxtor HDD
Sony 4x CD-ROM
HP CD-Writer 7200 Plus
Dell D1025HT 17" Trinitron Monitor
Sound Blaster AWE 32 Sound Card
Logitech Trackman Marble Mouse

Later, I built a faster computer for animation, rendering, and editing:

Dual Pentium III 600MHz CPUs, 512KB L2 Cache
Asus P2B-DS motherboard with onboard Adaptec Ultra-2 SCSI
Elsa Gloria II 64MB AGP
256mb Corsair PC100 CAS2 DIMM RAM
18GB Quantum Atlas III Ultra-2 SCSI Hard Drive
Teac 32x SCSI CD-ROM
Supermicro SC-750A Tower Case

The Gloria II 3D accelerator was able to draw the character animation in real time at frame rates sometimes exceeding 30fps, which means I rarely had to render preview videos to see what it would look like. This saved a lot of time during the animation process. The card is also very fast at 2D, able to play fullscreen video with no dropped frames.

Having dual CPUs was helpful. Not only did the additional processor increase the rendering speed almost twofold, it also sped up 3D viewport frame rates and video compression. The 256MB of memory was adequate for rendering at video resolution, but rendering 2k images for print just choked the machine.

If I were going to do this again, I'd want:

A few 36gb SCSI Seagate Barracudas in a striped RAID array
A Wildcat graphics accelerator
A gigabyte of memory
Dual 21-inch monitors
A high-quality video capture/output card