3ds Max Design Hardware Typically, the base system requirements for 3ds Max and 3ds Max Design (the two are almost the exact same product) are about the same as they are for Revit; however, 3ds Max stresses your workstation differently and exposes weakness in certain components. With 3ds Max there isn’t any BIM data interaction to deal with; instead you have CPU-bound rendering processes. At the same time, 3ds Max is all about high end graphics capabilities to handle the onscreen display and navigation of millions of polygons as well as large complicated textures and lighting. For typical AEC imagery which doesn’t require subobject animation, the problems that Max has to deal with are related to the following: • Polygons - Interacting with millions of vertices, edges, faces, and elements on screen at any time; • Materials - Physical properties, bitmaps, reaction to incoming light energy, surface mapping on polygonal surfaces, and procedural mappings; • Lighting - Physical and non-physical lighting models, calculating direct and indirect illumination, shadows and reflections; • Rendering - Combining polygons, materials, lighting, and environment together to produce photorealistic imagery; ray casting with Global Illumination and Final Gather under the mental ray rendering engine; post-rendering effects; Regarding the CPU, 3ds Max is a highly tuned multi-threaded application across the board. Having many fast processing cores allows for nearly instantaneous interaction with the program even with very large models. Its mental ray rendering engine is CPU dependent and designed from the ground up to take advantage of multiple processors. It also scales pretty well with your CPUs capabilities - adding more cores will shorten rendering times. In addition, it includes distributed bucket rendering and BackBurner, which allow for distributing rendering tasks across physical machines. Taken together, 3ds Max requires the best CPU you can afford, with as many cores as you can get. If you spend a lot of time in 3ds Max Design and render high resolution images that take a long time to produce, you owe it to yourself to look at more highly- powered workstations that feature two physical multi-core CPUs. As such, 3ds Max also requires a lot of system memory, particularly for rendering. The motherboard decides how much RAM you can install, and most common motherboards top out at 32GB, installed as (4) 8GB DIMMs. If you regularly deal with large animation projects with complex models and lots of textures you may find the added RAM capability found in very high end workstations - upwards of 192GB - to be compelling in your specification decisions. This is true for any machine used in a rendering farm as well; rendering jobs sent to non- production machines with a low amount of RAM can often fail. The best bet is to ensure all machines on a farm have the required amount of RAM start with and, as much as possible, the same basic CPU capabilities as your primary 3ds Max machine. Although the files you create in 3ds Max are not as large as those in Revit, like Revit and Navisworks the program itself is notoriously slow to load. Here a fast storage system pays off greatly. With 3ds Max we have a continually improving display system which is working to take more direct advantage of the graphics processing unit (GPU) capabilities in various ways. The Nitrous viewport display system allows for a more interactive, real-time working environment with lighting and shadows, which requires higher-end graphics hardware to use effectively. The iRay rendering system can use the GPU for rendering tasks. We discuss the needs of 3ds Max in the section on graphics hardware. 3ds Max artists always use other programs as well, such as Photoshop, Mudbox, Revit, Inventor, and AutoCAD, so make sure your workstation specification covers all of the bases.
Posted on: Fri, 31 Oct 2014 19:56:43 +0000
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