Hi! I use Maya and Toon Boom Harmony. I’m still kind of learning –
I’m doing this kind of stuff.
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/337379142/charlie-and-doyle?ref=category
I’m totally not using this as just an excuse to post my kickstarter. I mean… busted right? No but seriously.
Anyways. I’ve run into some really lengthy render times when Toon Boom uses maya to render out 3D and some really awful slowdown when using particle effects in Harmony. The CPU is an i5. The PC has 10 gb of memory.
I currently have an ATI card, a 7970 with 3 GB of DDR5. I’m trying to diagnose the bottleneck because I’d love to use particle effects and decrease my render times. (generally if I try to use a particle effect, after a bit, Toon Boom will crash or become unstable, or it’s extremely slow, almost painting the screen.)
I know there are some pretty fancy solutions out there for something like this and if my kickstarter gets funded I’ll be able to get a bit fancier, but I’m thinking right now, which is the easiest, cheapest fix?
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I was thinking of this: (it’s a gaming card but generally these work pretty good with Maya and Toon Boom, vs ATI, right?)
Gigabyte GeForce GTX 970 G1 Gaming 4GB GDDR5 PCiE Video Graphics Card GV-N970G1 GAMING-4GD
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( This: (its a workstation card and I get differing google results on this, where folks say the gaming cards are just as good etc)
NVIDIA Quadro K2000 2GB GDDR5 Graphics card
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I could bump up the memory
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I could maybe put an I7 iin.
Any help would be much appreciated! Thank you!!!
Just a few things to think about:
I am not sure if you realize that the graphics card is only rendering the display of work in process. TB recommends the NVIDIA Geforce GTX 780/NVIDIA GeForce GTX 775M which are gaming style cards not workstation class cards in the specs. From your description it seems as though you are seeing delays in the display of the artwork. That is going to slow you down.
Have you an assessment of the actual file rendering time?
How many GHZ is your i5?
I think of the CPU as brain/muscle while RAM is your art studio space. The muscle needs room to flex, breathe and hold your artwork. RAM is relatively easy and cheap to max out but you will be throwing money away if you plan to upgrade to a new computer within a couple of years. Chances are the new system will use a faster form of RAM and it would be counter-productive to bring this RAM investment to the new system if even compatible. On the other hand if you are going to be using this system for a few more years max out your RAM. I have read that TB software likes a lot of RAM.
If you are keeping this system I would max out the RAM first.
Sounds like that graphics card is insufficient. If your system is compatible replace it with the NVIDIA Geforce GTX 780/NVIDIA GeForce GTX 775M. (What platform are you on? What OS version are you running?)
Last I would upgrade the CPU unless it is sub 3ghz.
Hi! Thanks for responding so quickly. No, not necessarily delays when drawing but what happens is, let’s say I use a camera movement on a 3d scene. Toon Boom calls Maya and renders through it, which can take… a really long time. That might just be the price of working with 3D content. IE, this took a day or a so to render as a mov file.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DQBjjzIusko
The camera move requires it to render each frame out… it’s something that I’ve sort of stopped doing (camera moves like that). This probably turns it into a Maya problem because that’s where the time is being used.
It’s a 3.4 ghz i5. windows 8.1.
The Nvidea card I posted I think is an upgrade to a 780 but I’ll research. Would that drastically improve things, do you think? NVIDIA vs ATI? Is it that big of a difference?
I’ll check the RAM.
If you are considering the 980 I would contact Toon Boom Support just to make sure it would work. At this moment it is not on the recommendation list and TB just revised the website. I’d hate to invest the money only to have it too advanced to be of any use.