I'm new to forum and to 3D coming from a pencil background and trying to catch up with technology. So the burning question is…..PC's or MACS and what system specs would I need for Houdini? I currently have a Windows XP and I'm not even going to bother causing a giggle with the specs, cause needless to say they are in need of a serious overhaul!
Any advice would be much appreciated and out of curiosity is anyone into Joss Weadon's Firefly?
You'll need a PC because there is no Mac version of Houdini (though I'd like one).
You'll need a decent 3D graphics card. Go with Nvidia. ATI may have some faster cards available for games but almost every 3D program that uses OpenGL plays better with Nvidia. Houdini in my experience is particularly bad with ATI consumer graphics cards (Radeons). You don't need the latest greatest most expensive graphics card, just something decent, a Geforce FX 5900 or 6600 is more than sufficient.
At least 512 megs of RAM, 1 gig will be more comfortable.
My personal preference right now is for Intel CPUs and Chipsets because I've always had stability issues with AMD, but you may get better perfromance out of AMD.
All in all you don't need a very expensive computer to run Houdini, just something dependable.
