Phobya water-cooled case design thread - Stage 2

Until now, sketchup. But I'm modeling things again on maya. The file size and the amount of polygon in SU are just crazy (100MB in my case). I like low poly modeling with mesh smooth better.

So maya + mental ray. If I make it to stage 3.

 

160MB for my case and close to 240MB for SnowyOwl's . Id love to learn 3DS or maya, SolidWorks is great for designing manufacture ready products but it is terrible when it comes to creating "organic" shapes or surfaces.

 

OMG this is sooooooo beatiful
Nitrix is really gonna dig this... Facebook here we come

As for computer power tell me if your a little bit short i have my FEA(Finite Element Analysys) monster that can be used overnight to render or do motion....with 16gb of memory, a firePro V5800 and an i7950 OC to 4.2GHZ that baby can tackle anything...well almost exepted fluid dynamics.

Thank you again for those beauty shot

 

Omg 240MB, that's crazy !

3Ds or maya aren't that hard to learn. I did learn them at school and have alittle crush on maya due to its material creator tool.

 

Your welcome, Im glad you like it! I am trying to put together an animation but its slow goings

That sounds like a nice beefy system .

 

SU + VRay. Typical. I got to know it well though. so I'm staying. That render looks nice man. I'd like to put my case waaay back there, so you can see it between those 2.

I did my stuff on a AMD Athlon X4 620 (stock speed), 4gig DDR2 800 MHz, and a 8600GT.

Oh and mine is 13Mb LOL

 

Try having 4 of these: http://www.scan.co.uk/products/6gb-...gddr5-sli-2x-dp-dl-dvi-i-3d-stereo-sdi-retail

Hardcore Raytracing Cheesecake! If only my parents won the lottery.....

On a on-topic note, i love Roboduck's and the Purus (sorry, i couldn't type your name) designs. They look AMAZING

 

This is an OFF-TOPIC post, but here is what could have been monolith if I'd stick up with micro-ATX only size.

This is in fact the scratch build I'll begin. The case is 300 (w) x 300(d) x 600 (h) mm / 54L. What do you think of it ?









Keep in mind that it is NOT my entry for this contest. The one in this this contest is the full size monolith

 

Hmm, if you moved the psu forward a little and flipped the radiators so the connectors are at the top you could probably lower them and the mobo, making the case not quite so tall, just a thought

 

Just a little article that explain the idea behind what we are doing here wich is a new trend in design and developpement





See this link for the complete article
http://www.nxtbook.com/nxtbooks/level5/desktopengineering_201102/index.php?bm=normal#/42

 

Thanks mate, that was very interesting and instructive.

 

I did my work in SU (razer did the renders for me, thanks dude) on a 1.73ghz Dual Core Pentium Mobile with 2.5gb RAM, and the last week of the work I had a HD4550 to help out.

 

Does sketchup utilize more than one core? I'm almost to the point where I want to re-model my case in sketchup because "StupidWorks" is being such a recourse hog That and there is a much larger selection of component models.

 

I'm not sure, but it seems to me that SU only use 1 core ... this is the reason why I'm going to maya. At the end I was most of the time with 1 core at 100% and the 3 others at idle. SU use a lot of ram too (almost 2Go in my case)

Edit : I'd say that SU is very GPU /RAM dependant. Doesn't seems to rely on the CPU too much, at least multi-core ones.

 

Sorry i have to say this but 3D solid modeling is a linear task....wich means that almost every CAD system for sale today only use 1 or at best 2 of your CPU depending on the kind of operation your doing.

Rendering can take advantage of multi-threading because it can split the operation in a lot of individual calculation.....it's all a mathematical equation.

If Maya is less Cpu intensive it's probably because the programmer don't use as much equation to do the same task, since maya mainly works with surface model.

I'm hoping someday CAD program find a way to use all that power modern computer are giving us.

In the mean time all we can do is use the right tool for the right job
Solidworks = Solid modeling, 2d drawing and simulation
MAya = surface modeling for animation, Rendering and artistic creation.

 

True but going from Pro-Engineer to SolidWorks everything got prettier but also took significantly longer to process (as well as having a lot more bugs). I shouldn't have said "utilizes multiple cores" I should have asked for the most efficient . My Phenom x6 is great for rendering (faster than my i7 at work) but when it comes to rebuilding parts and rotating it lags significantly. The rebuilding is a pain as it is a single threaded process but the rotation glitches are from me using 2x 5770s instead of a dedicated OpenGL workstation card. That being said my home computer is a gaming rig not for solidworks.

SolidWorks is great but unless you have a dedicated CAD workstation it can be very frustrating to work on, so I am just trying to see what others experiences have been with other modeling software.

 

That is so true. I'm switching to maya, even if it's not the best tool for engineering, cause you mainly model at a very low poly level. Scene and models are very light, just place the most important faces and hedges and then you apply a mesh smooth at rendering time.

This is the only solution I found to my problem. My computer lags a way to much in SU because of the high poly count. Rotation, translation are just a nightmare and sometimes I just don't know if SU crashed or if my computer is just dying among the calculus.

EDIT : BTW I've never used solid works or pro engineer ... but I did use autacad at school, the one running on DOS

EDIT²: It would be nice to have a comparison between CAD softwares PROs and CONs. It's always nice to learn from others experience. And yes Snowy ... one job, one tool

 

Hey all,

My main workstation/gamer is an EVGA 790i running a Q8200@stock with 6GB of Corsair XMS@1333 with an HD5870@stock. And, of course, it is completely water cooled, and packed into a Zalman Z7 case!

About comparing Sketchup ( SU ) to SolidWorks ( SW );

My design is about 65mb in SU. In SW it is about 12mb.

I have used solidworks since 1998, and it took about 3 hours to put together my original design. Never touched a render before this though, and got Maxwell for my first renders of my design.

When I made it to the next stage and realized I would have to display my design populated with components, I committed my time to learning how to use Sketchup. That way I could use the parts that have already been built and posted on SCC ( thanks again to all the contributors! ). I added it all up and I spent about 80 hours trying to build the design in SU.

The problem I ran into was trying to wrap my head around a surface modeler ( and only a half baked one at that ) as opposed to a solid modeler. I downloaded the vray demo to render, and ran into a whole host of problems between it and SU.

Down to the nits:

SU is single core/cpu bound, so speed is king, and it is also limited to 32bit which means it can only access 2GB of memory max. This combination of issues, along with the fact that SU is heavily dependent on your GPU's OpenGL driver compatibility make it difficult to use for high poly-count work. When you add in plug-in rendering software like vray then you have even less of that 2GB of RAM available for use.

SW is multi-threaded, but the actual calculation engine can only run on a single core ( although I believe that as of the 2011 edition it now supports multiple cores as well ). So in theory it does get a "boost" from multiple cores. It runs 32 or 64 bit, so it can access all the RAM you throw in the pc. The vendor makes a big fuss about having a "workstation" GPU versus a "gaming" GPU, but in practical day-to-day use I have always gotten better performance from a "gaming" GPU with the correct drivers.

In practical use:

On SW I can open an assembly with hundreds of individual components, each containing hundreds more features, each with the own properties/textures etc. adding upto to millions of entities without any slowdowns or stuttering on the display.

In SU, just trying to design my case, every single change takes about 3 minutes of processing, followed by another minute pause while it updates the display, and that is with -all- of the recommendations on the website to "speed up" SU.

Needless to say I, should I progress to the next stage, I am going straight back to solidworks/maxwell.

 

That´s so true. I´ve been building large engine model in SolidWorks and it lags very annoyingly while rotating and zooming. I tried to open the very same model in my ´05-computer (3500+, 2Gb, GF 7800GT) and it takes a while to load and all the changes take 5min or so, but rotating and zooming doesn´t lag. I just don´t understand?? Could it really be that GeForces are much better utilized in SolidWorks?

Now I´ve been using Autodesk Inventor 2011 Professional since I can get student licence from school for free. It seems to work very well and when rebuilding etc. all six cores seem to be utilized in task manager (all cores jump to 100%). Very fast compared to the older version of SolidWorks. But in the end, I would still prefer SW..

 

when is this article coming on? it's been more than a week!