I work as an industrial designer for a commercial furniture company. We make chairs, desks, screening systems, lounges, custom joinery including for hotels, a lot of upholstered products in patterned fabrics, leather, molded plastic and aluminium, welded steel, gas assisted molded foam, CNC machined timber panels. You name it, we do it.
So I came in and started modelling existing and new designs in solidworks, Rhino with t-splines add in and then rendering in Keyshot. The powers that be really like Keyshot’s VR capabilities so we want something like that in whatever package we end up going with, but I have been asked to investigate a better package for rendering photo-realistic interiors of hotels especially.
I also am running a Win7 64bit, i7 3770K @ 3.50GHz Ivy Bridge on an Intel DH77EB motherboard with 8Gb DDR3 @ 671MHz. Unfortunately I have been given a gaming graphics card (first thing to go) as the guys here just got my an off the shelf PC somewhere.
So I wanted to get some guidance. I’m not a huge computer guru. I know what RAM is and how to install a graphics card, what SSD drives are etc, but I’m pretty lame when it comes to motherboard, CPU, RAM combos.
I’m thinking we will probably go with Maxwell or Modo, maybe keep keyshot for VR, but I need to do animations, e.g. showing a chair reclining, showing an office screening system assembly and that sort of thing. I’d also like something which I have a bit more control over than keyshot when it comes to movement and placement of objects. I like mates in solidworks and it would be good to be able to make a scene in solidworks but then be able to line up new objects with accuracy. All you can do is snap to ground in keyshot, and if you want to use the solidworks add in, things like legs or backs of chairs often don’t come in.
Also, I’m not sure if I can just upgrade this PC. It takes 14+ hours to do a nice big render at 600DPI A3 size, so we want to reduce that as much as possible, maybe with network rendering capabilities.
Advice?