New system for Arnold (Maya) Rendering

[Danowen]

I'm trying to specify a new computer system whose most demanding task will be to render 4k animations with Arnold in Maya. Currently Arnold requires CUDA and thus Nvidia. The only given is probably a 4090 (liquid cooled?). I'm thinking 64 GB RAM. AMD or Intel? Which CPU? PCIE 5.0? One SSD for the OS and another for Maya and current projects? SSDs = 4 TB each? Minimum 2 4k screens. Three? I'm willing to spend a lot. BTW my custom water-cooled Ryzen 1080ti 32GB system is still going 5 to 6 years later.

Custom or off the shelf?

Thank you in advance for any and all replies

Dan

 

[Solaris17]

I mean; its almost like you just asked us how to be a 3D designer?

It looks like you got the baseline requirements for your software. Thats good atleast.

Does it benefit from multiple cores or does it favor clock speed?

Do you load and save a lot? How big are the scenes? Do you render on the fly? How much does ram benefit the application?

Do YOU want 2,3,4 screens? Thats a personal choice. You can render on a gameboy if you want.

 

[ir_cow]

"Arnold is an advanced Monte Carlo ray tracing renderer built for the demands of feature-length animation and visual effects."

Sounds like Autodesk version of Renderman, V-ray or another licensed program. I remember seeing this a few years ago. Just a real-time render plugin for Maya that uses CUDA.

• Windows 10 or later, with the Visual Studio 2019 redistributable.
• Linux with at least glibc 2.17 and libstdc++ 4.8.5 (gcc 4.8.5). This is equivalent to RHEL/CentOS 7.
• macOS 10.13 or later.
• x86-64 CPUs need to support the SSE4.1 instruction set. Apple Mac models with M series chip are natively supported.
• GPU rendering works on Windows and Linux only and requires an NVIDIA GPU of the Ampere, Turing, Volta, Pascal, or Maxwell architecture. We recommend using the 525.89 or higher drivers on Linux and 528.49, or higher on Windows. See Arnold GPU for more information.
• For GPU rendering, the cache also needs to be re-populated after installing a new Arnold version, updating to a new NVIDIA driver , or changing the hardware configuration of GPUs on the system. More information can be found here.
• OptiX™ denoiser requires an NVIDIA GPU with CUDA™ Compute Capability 5.0 and above.

From reading the spec, it sounds like that the scene is cached into GPU memory. So if you do the whole viewport, it will take longer or just not have enough memory. All the way down to the Nvidia 9 series is supported. So no Tensor or RT cores needed or used. More CUDA cores and more memory is the goal here.

This is just for the preview. It seems like the final render is still CPU and designed to be sent to a rendering farm. $380 a year isn't horrible, but Blender is free. So unless you work for a production firm, save yourself money. That's the big difference. Autodesk is designed for large scale projects where you have access to rendering farms, big teams and such.

 

[HBSound]

I'm trying to specify a new computer system whose most demanding task will be to render 4k animations with Arnold in Maya. Currently Arnold requires CUDA and thus Nvidia. The only given is probably a 4090 (liquid cooled?). I'm thinking 64 GB RAM. AMD or Intel? Which CPU? PCIE 5.0? One SSD for the OS and another for Maya and current projects? SSDs = 4 TB each? Minimum 2 4k screens. Three? I'm willing to spend a lot. BTW my custom water-cooled Ryzen 1080ti 32GB system is still going 5 to 6 years later.

Custom or off the shelf?

Thank you in advance for any and all replies

Dan

How is this system coming along?