Is there a sub forum for 3D and 2D rendering on non-PowerMacs. Has anyone had experience rendering 3D (animation and still) and 2D on a Mac mini, iMac G4 (sunflower design), iMac G5? Please post links. Barefeats.com has some but I'd like it from one of the members. God bless, Alvin
a little correction, when you say non-PowerMac, that means any macintosh built before 1994 when apple 'switched' to the PowerPC processor. in this case were talking about 68xxxx based macs as the non-PowerMacs. so technically, the mini is still a 'powermac' since it does use a powerpc proc. maybe you mean non-pro-mac-machines? be assured that a mini can handle 2d and 3d rendering but not as fast as the 64bit cpus. as a general rule, adding more memory to any 'low-end' or g3/g4 mac can make it quite usable for 3d rendering, albeit slowly.
I've done 3d rendering on 68K Quadras before...definitely much slower than any Power PC Mac, but not impossible. A G4 should do very well...also, if your company has a high enough budget, you could set up a render farm composed of commodity Linux PCs networked to your Mac. Many pro level rendering software have optional "renderfarm" modules that run on the Linux boxes networked to a Mac "front-end." The interface is on the Mac, but the grunt work is done by the Linux boxes in the background. These renderfarms are used in large 3D studios such as Pixar, ILM, etc.
Hi. That's good news for everyone. Do you have a link on how to do parallel computing between OS X and Linux, using Maya and/or Photoshop? God bless, Alvin [Edited on 12.17.05 by Alvin777]
