Hi, I'm Italian (I writ this as first thing because you will notice that my English is not perfect) and I started my 3D studies 3 years ago with Maya and Zbrush, now I want to move to Houdini because I find it more suitable for me (despite the learning path is not so easy ). I wanted to change my Desktop to a new one, can someone tell me what kind of hardware should I buy? I like vfx more than modeling so I wanted It to be more “vfx oriented”. I have around 1000$ budget (I know, it's not so much but for now I can't have more money to invest) so I taught that I could buy a PC and upgrade it along the way.
Mah…direi che con $1000 combini poco, cerca un PC con un processore AMD tipo Ryzen Threadripper con più cores possibili, e almeno 32Gb di RAM. Per GPU, cerca almeno un AMD Radeon 580X oppure un Nvidia 1660ti.
Translation:
With $1000 you're not getting much. Try a PC with an AMD Ryzen Threadripper with as many cores as possible, at least 32Gb of RAM and for GPU a Radeon 580x or Nvidia 1660ti at least.
there are several discussions on hardware suggestions, you might want to browse over them, as they may be helpful even if your budget is limited.
My suggestion is, if you are going for “VFX” (and if by that you mean points/particles), to invest in RAM both on the mainboard and the GPU. Houdini will happily crash if the graphics board does not have sufficient RAM to display geometry or points/point numbers when debugging a scene. My personal experience was that graphic boards under 4GB are basically useless in Houdini, 6GB is OK-ish but may crash with slightly heavier geo (mind you that I am working in movie context, so “heavy” is multi-million-polygons to me). On the other hand, I couldn't notice a significant performance difference in USAGE between a 1060 and a 2080 (whereas the 2080 does perform a bit better on GPU-optimized code).
Since more and more in/around Houdini seems to be games-oriented anyway (and developed in single-threaded-python scripts), my personal bias wouldn't be “many cores”, actually, but “high single core performance”. This definitely is something that can be discussed in lengths - but for the moment I stand by my word: Choose higher single-core performance over “as many cores as possible”.
Also, you definitely want to go all SSD, no mechanic HD anywhere. It's just way too slow for all the IO that you need in Houdini.
Also, you probably want to look into using Linux. It is completely unusable for daily work (to me, that is), but it does give you better performance as the OS under Houdini. Even a dual-boot scenario could make sense.
Again, have a look around on the forum, things like these have been discussed a lot.
Marc
--- Out of here. Being called a dick after having supported Houdini users for years is over my paygrade. I will work for money, but NOT for "you have to provide people with free products" Indie-artists. Good bye. https://www.marc-albrecht.de [www.marc-albrecht.de]
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