Out of Pod Experience

But will it blend?

Came expecting new hardware to make smoothies with. Leaving...confused.

I came expecting to find Angry Robots demanding i kiss thier shiny metal butt ......


then realised it said "Blender"

Mainly you want video card memory. Depending on what you plan to get into, a half GB of physical video memory is a good start. Nah, won't hurt your processor, just make sure the system is cool, ventilated, maybe extra fans if you need them. At least in the case were my old computer (years ago) could take up to two days for a single render, a week for a short or crude animation, I used a full tower case and loaded it with fans. But now, systems don't run as hot, I even have a modeling app on my nexus 7 and it has no fans with a quad-core cpu, though it's not render capable but that is just lack of software prob. But it spins polygons very well, nice for concept work.

I tend to model a lot more on my laptop currently, unlike my last laptop. Desktop is still superior, especially with bigger jobs, though the bulk of my work is low-poly sub-division which is actually challenging for getting the best possible model for real-time rendering; low-poly and no errors present. You are sculpting there, can be done on any device, though yes rendering can take a little time depending on your settings in the render job. I haven't used Blender in maybe 5 years, so I'm not sure how it's default renderer is, or if it's any good, though I'm sure it has plug-ins for rendering engines that I've used (such as V-Ray). Personally I'm not a fan of Blender, was a little too quirky for me, and yes not crash proof - at least back then that I knew.

Well, started with drafting in high school (pre-CAD days) couple semesters, helped a lot for blueprint/plan reading in various jobs over the years. Got into CAD some 15 years ago; we used it at the company I was working with at the time. Easily translated into modeling apps, started that a little over ten years ago including animation which was a lot of what I had to do with my CAD productions. Drawing pixels since before drafting (actually had to calculate them), so UV texturing was a no brainer. Sculpting like you have there is fun, I'd highly recommend trying out sculptris by pixologic, the makers of z-brush which is imo the by faaaaar best sculpting app made or unmade for any computer (it's industry standard). Though you don't need z-brush currently, but you do need sculptris, and it's quite free while remaining loaded with fun. You can use more than one app, and should, and eventually must as your skill improves.

Not only Sculptis, but if you are intending to go the sculpting direction, you may want to look into DAZ Studio and the community revolving around DAZ 3D which is very large. DAZ Studio is for rendering, and does a good job, especially for beginners in that it's easy and forgiving. It'll probably render faster than Blender, but that is just my guess form comparison five years ago. There is a free version there to get you started with plenty of goodies. If you ever want to buy apps form DAZ 3D, wait for a sale, always great sales near give away... and sometimes give aways since they make most of their money of the GIANT community driven store (you sell your stuff there).

But anyway, VRAM is going to do you the most good short of having your own server cluster for render jobs. 30 minutes for a render is nothing, though probably not needed for that render as any enhanced features on a single model will probably not be detectable by the human eye. System RAM will help, but mostly just for running that modeling app at the same time as your bloated OS. No need to go over the top on a CPU, you mainly want a fairly good current architecture GPU. But for GPU, I recommend Nvidia, as their development tools are far better than ATI, far-far better. Nvidia developer tools are just the best, period. If you get an ATI and wind up wanting to work on shaders for your models for instance, you'll throw a tantrum for not having an Nvidia card to run their tools.

Modeling takes time to master, 1000's and 1000's of hours practicing. imo 1000hrs to just get past raw beginner. Keep at it, most people that start wind up quitting before the first month. Into your second month now, it' may be something for you.