Why is CGI so expensive?

[TechnoWraith]

Admittedly I have absolutely no knowledge of the inner workings of modern special effects or the process of creating CGI graphics. However, common sense would tell me that there is no doubt in my mind that there is still bad and good CG. First of all you have to design something, deciding what you want to render or create. Everyone knows there is good and bad art. Plus, why should anyone believe that there aren't good and bad CGI artists? The final piece of evidence to support my point, just compare Gollum and one of the stupid aliens from attack of the clones. I don't think anyone can say with a straight face that Lucas was falling behind because of budget.

the possibilities are legion here:

But two primary concerns: Poor design and poor execution. A poorly designed animation wis nothing but boring eye-candy, if even that. My tutorial for Maya says to NOT to just "Dive in and Model." It says to plan diligently. Make your animation tell a story. Yeah, a puddlejumper flying over a field is great. But is that puddlejumper running from a Wraith Dart? Or on the way to pick up an expedition team? Executing the sequence effectively is just as important as designing it. Obviously, a mistake in execution (such as accidently rendering the puddlejumper upside down) will detract greatly from your animation. CGI isn't just magically throwing stuff on a computer screen. It takes months of planning to create a short animation. And short of owning a supercomputer, it can take just as long to render, too!

[Avatar28]

Let's not even go there, Crichton. If you're talking hardware (which he is), most 3D workstations are AMD/Intel based and typically will run either XP Pro or Linux (or other open source OS). Fact is that IBM was not able to get the clock speeds up on the PPC fast enough to keep it competitive with x86 based systems. That's one of the primary reasons why Apple is switching everything over to x86 based.

[TechnoWraith]

Let's not even go there, Crichton. If you're talking hardware (which he is), most 3D workstations are AMD/Intel based and typically will run either XP Pro or Linux (or other open source OS). Fact is that IBM was not able to get the clock speeds up on the PPC fast enough to keep it competitive with x86 based systems. That's one of the primary reasons why Apple is switching everything over to x86 based.

My imaging rig is gonna be a dual processor AMD/Athlon machine. I'm looking at getting at least 4gig chips, and 2 gigs of RAM. I'm also looking for some industrial sized hard drives, as standard 120 gig drives don't stand a chance against the image files i'll be dumping on them.

[Crichton]

Let's not even go there, Crichton.

LOL, you don't need to think this a confrontation . I for one, think we should definetly go there since I was responding to someone who is trying to get the best performance from a computer for this specific task. I don't like Mac's personally, but I was just mearly repeating the opinions of two of my friends that are professional graphic artists. They laugh at PC's for this specific task. Me, I don't do any kind of work on my computer that is this demanding so I love my PC since I hate the Mac interface/menus/etc. But, this is just what multiple computer artists have told me....Mac all the way. We should find out which one is best though to help people looking for the best purchase.

[Beatrice Otter]

Admittedly I have absolutely no knowledge of the inner workings of modern special effects or the process of creating CGI graphics. However, common sense would tell me that there is no doubt in my mind that there is still bad and good CG. First of all you have to design something, deciding what you want to render or create. Everyone knows there is good and bad art. Plus, why should anyone believe that there aren't good and bad CGI artists? The final piece of evidence to support my point, just compare Gollum and one of the stupid aliens from attack of the clones. I don't think anyone can say with a straight face that Lucas was falling behind because of budget.

Ah, I do believe Shadow was joking

[Crichton]

Ah, I do believe Shadow was joking

Probably right.

[Avatar28]

My imaging rig is gonna be a dual processor AMD/Athlon machine. I'm looking at getting at least 4gig chips, and 2 gigs of RAM. I'm also looking for some industrial sized hard drives, as standard 120 gig drives don't stand a chance against the image files i'll be dumping on them.

Sweet, although 120 gig drives are really rather smallish these days anyways. If you're dropping that kind of bank on a system, I would suggest getting a good hardware based RAID 5 controller (to avoid a performance penalty on writes). Set it up using 4+ 250-300 gig hard drives which is the sweet spot right now. 4 300 gig drives, for instance, would net you 900 gigs of space and you would still have some redundancy so you don't lose everything if one of the drives craps out on you.

LOL, you don't need to think this a confrontation . I for one, think we should definetly go there since I was responding to someone who is trying to get the best performance from a computer for this specific task. I don't like Mac's personally, but I was just mearly repeating the opinions of two of my friends that are professional graphic artists. They laugh at PC's for this specific task. Me, I don't do any kind of work on my computer that is this demanding so I love my PC since I hate the Mac interface/menus/etc. But, this is just what multiple computer artists have told me....Mac all the way. We should find out which one is best though to help people looking for the best purchase.

Then I have to say your friends are mistaken. The G5 compared pretty closely on a clock for clock basis to an Opteron when it first came out (and my understanding is that the newer Opterons are actually improved further still so they should still be pretty even). Furthermore is the price difference. For what you're going to pay for said high end Mac, you can get a PC that's faster still due to the price delta.

[Crichton]

Then I have to say your friends are mistaken. The G5 compared pretty closely on a clock for clock basis to an Opteron when it first came out (and my understanding is that the newer Opterons are actually improved further still so they should still be pretty even). Furthermore is the price difference. For what you're going to pay for said high end Mac, you can get a PC that's faster still due to the price delta.

Sweet, like I said I'm not personally a fan of Mac's at all. I'm going to have to go rub this in their faces and see what kind of reaction I get.

[TechnoWraith]

Sweet, although 120 gig drives are really rather smallish these days anyways. If you're dropping that kind of bank on a system, I would suggest getting a good hardware based RAID 5 controller (to avoid a performance penalty on writes). Set it up using 4+ 250-300 gig hard drives which is the sweet spot right now. 4 300 gig drives, for instance, would net you 900 gigs of space and you would still have some redundancy so you don't lose everything if one of the drives craps out on you.

Thanks for the suggestions. I was planning setting up some sort of RAID array. I was gonna use a Full-Tower cabinet, or even get a server system and swap in a dual chip motherboard (because i don't know if all servers come with a dual socket motherboard, do they?) It'll probably take several months to build the system, as i must save up, and with going to vancouver next year for the Stargate con, my budget's been maxed out in the "extra spending" department until after next march.

[Avatar28]

Sweet, like I said I'm not personally a fan of Mac's at all. I'm going to have to go rub this in their faces and see what kind of reaction I get.

Yeah, if you look on the net, the whole thing with Apple releasing these benchmarks about the G5 being the fastest PC on the planet was VERY poor from a benchmarking standpoint. For instance, they used a compiler that was optimized for the G5 but then for the Intel the compiler was completely UNoptimized and further neutered it with certain settings in both the compiler and the system itself. When benchmarks were redone, the Mac generally didn't fare as well. Here are a couple of links for you to share:
Mac vs PC link 1

As another example of the price disparity, I configured two systems, a Dual G5 with 2.5 GHz CPUs and a Dell Precision 670. The Dell came out about $600 than the G5 BUT, there are a couple of caveats there.

A) the Dell system had RAID 0, Apple didn't mention RAID.
B) Both systems have quadcores but the Dell's Xeons also have hyperthreading giving an effective 8 processors for certain situations. I'll also note here that the Xeons are ridiculously expensive anyways so may not be the best choice for a more apples to apples comparison (the Opteron would would be closer methinks)

[Crichton]

Yeah, if you look on the net, the whole thing with Apple releasing these benchmarks about the G5 being the fastest PC on the planet was VERY poor from a benchmarking standpoint. For instance, they used a compiler that was optimized for the G5 but then for the Intel the compiler was completely UNoptimized and further neutered it with certain settings in both the compiler and the system itself. When benchmarks were redone, the Mac generally didn't fare as well. Here are a couple of links for you to share:
Mac vs PC link 1

As another example of the price disparity, I configured two systems, a Dual G5 with 2.5 GHz CPUs and a Dell Precision 670. The Dell came out about $600 than the G5 BUT, there are a couple of caveats there.

A) the Dell system had RAID 0, Apple didn't mention RAID.
B) Both systems have quadcores but the Dell's Xeons also have hyperthreading giving an effective 8 processors for certain situations. I'll also note here that the Xeons are ridiculously expensive anyways so may not be the best choice for a more apples to apples comparison (the Opteron would would be closer methinks)

Green for you

[Avatar28]

Many thanks, Crichton.

Heh, you know what would be the ultimate bomb?

8 processor Intel Xeon systems. Each Xeon processor is dual cored and has hyperthreading. So you have 16 processors and 32 virtual processors.

But it gets better. I hear quad cores are headed our way soon. Assuming each core still had hyperthreading (doubtful but possible), you would be talking about 32 real processors and 64 virtual cores. All in one box.

Hehe, sweet as heck huh?

Wanna get crazier still? Gigabyte recently came out with a board that has 4 x16 PCI Express slots on it (of which two can be used at full speed or all at half speed). They also have cards that have two graphics cores on one physical card. So at the least you could have 4 graphics cores going in your system (eventually they'll go dual core on each of those as well, probably about the same Intel and AMD go to quad cores) and potentially 8 (or 16 after going to dual core GPUs).

Let's combine the two now. I'm pretty sure that it's possible to do at least to some degree, it's as much a matter of it's not been attempted. Of course, this is all in the realm of mere possibility and assumes the availability of drivers and software that would also support and take advantage of it. And just to clarify, the hardware to do this is not currently available in the necessary form (a board like the Gigabyte that also supported dual sockets).

Now a workable workstation type system isn't going to have 8 cpu sockets, doubtful more than 2. So let's stick with that. Currently you could (theoretically) have a System with two physical processors, each with 2 cores and hyperthreading for a total of 4(8) cores and 4 GPUs. Given a year or two of time it wouldn't be unreasonable to double that to 8(16) CPU cores and 8 GPU cores in a single box. I don't want to think about the monster power supply that beast would need though.

[Nem2k]

tbh i doubt many workstations would have more than 1 processor just to keep costs down

the second processor would just sit there doing nothing considering 1) people sitting at the workstation wouldnt need to render which is where the 4 render buckets will kick in and 2) apart from XSI5, most of these programs arent multithreaded so wouldnt be able to make use of the 2nd cpu efficiently anyway

[Skydiver]

i'm not gonna argue tech points with you guys, but i just know that we needed to get new editing computers. for less than 10K each, we could get the G5's, 3 gig of ram and an extra 120 gig hard drive, plus the final cut editing suite where as if we'd have went PC it would have taken us three times that to custom build PC's with enough editing/processing/ram etc. to make it work

i'm not a huge mac fan overall, but i love my editing puter and i can do just about anything i want to do and my largest issues are the idiots up in computer services that hamper our downloading of updates and the such, and that's not a software issue but policy issue on behalf of the 'helpful' souls upstairs

[O'Neil]

No matter what kind of computer we try to build the Studio's will always have us beat due to one thing we cannot afford....... renderfarms!

I for one was looking at the Boxx Workstations. RainMaker uses them and absolutely loves them. The one I was looking at had 2 gigs RAM and 2 AMD Opteron processors along with a slew of other hardware, but $3500 is alot for me.