SGI: Computer Graphics

Anyone has any idea which version would work on the following?

- Indigo2 24bit - R4400 - XS
- Octane 200

Thanks in advance.

Octane 200 does not exist. Orign 200 exists or Octane2 exists.

3D Studio was a DOS application. 3D Studio Max is/was a Windows application.
Maya, LightWave are not dependant on the hardware version but the IRIX version.
From memory I have maya 6.5 and LW 5.6 and a few other minor graphics applications running on IRIX 6.5.
A modern or even not so modern PC or Mac would eat an IRIX based SGI for lunch when it comes to pushing 3D polygons around. Even a quad 1GHz with v12 and 8Gb RAM has a hard time keeping up with a few generations old Mac... And you get 1/10th the add-on features on IRIX and new newer applications like Z brush or Modo.

SGIs are fun to play with but don't get your expectations up on any 3D applications.

R.

Perhaps the poster meant Alias Studio Tools?

Also there was no XS graphics for Indigo2, there was only XZ (soon updated to 4 GE or Elan equivalent) and Extreme (8 GEs) within the GR3 family.

Thank you all for the replies. I guess I will have to stick with basic functions.

I am sorry, I guess I needed to get my question right The first machine I was asking about was XZ, hit the wrong key. And the second one was Origin (not Octane )..my apologies.

@robespierre - it was 3D studio I was inquiring about, but thanks for the Alias Tools reference!

@R - Thanks for the info and corrections!

- Neo

Jeeze, guys, no need to be so negative. I have yet to see a person starting out who needs a 6 ghz quad-xeon running Creo v9.

From the sig I'd say you need something very light. Maya 4.0 is supposed to be a lot faster on older hardware, and Maya skills will carry over to newer versions. There's also Lightwave which is very quick and should run fine on an Indy. In the free realm, try Ayam and of course there's Blender. Blender has an ... "unusual" interface so maybe that's not the best choice, although the principles of all of them are the same.

And if people sneer, just remember --

Thank you Hamei! I really appreciate the feedback. If I end up getting these ideas to work, I will post something back!

Neo.

Just wanted to throw my 2 coin in.....

Have just completed graphics for a television pilot and am close to completing VFX for a fantasy web series using Maya 4.0 on Irix for most, if not all, my 3D modeling. While my O2's may not be the fastest machines on the planet they are, for me, a whole lot more fun to work on than anything else.

3D studio has been ported to irix (it ran on a power indigo2), but I don't think it was ever commercialized (it was a port of 3DS 4.0 from Dos) nor supported. Instead, the project was killed and Max was launched.

It runs well on R10k indigo2, with solid or above, it's pretty snappy and fun to use.

I've got Maya 6.5 on my Octane2 (dual 600 V12 w/ 8 gig RAM) and so far it's still covering all the bases for me. The Intel/Nvidia stuff is light years ahead of it in terms of speed and Maya development maxed out at 6.5 on Irix, but really, 6.5 is pretty nearly feature complete. Maya 2012 is full of brand new widgets that do the exact same thing in a completely different way...

Well, Maya in many ways operates like a script interpreter with an UI on top, sometimes the feature implementation that calls the script engine (as in shell script, not movie script) are either rough or nonexistent. I presume this is what's being worked on in the more recent Maya releases. Sometimes it would be nice to have a bit more refined UI to work with. And less crashy when undoing. And with a mental ray compatible with one I can find for windows... Oh well.

Yes you can do everything Maya does from it's scripting language, Maya Embedded Language aka MEL, without ever using the UI. Are you saying Mental Ray doesn't come with the Windows version? I've never used a non-IRIX version...

No the problem is compatiblity. Maya 6.5 is old , and MR 3.4 is not compatible [for remote rendering] with 3.5 and so forth. No rendering on the fast, new, PC (Maya for windows of course lacking a dispatcher); which is a bummer because I really much prefer to model on IRIX.

Uh, I'm pretty sure the current version of Mental Ray is 3.1...

Which, considering that version 3.0 came out 10 years ago seems to indicate that Mental Images considers it to be a finished product...

Hmm, I must have been thinking of MRfM versions, in any event they've been incompatible to any version I've found (Perhaps the standalone had to be 3.0? I don't remember anymore)

But if you model something using Maya 6.5 on Irix, you can open the model with Maya 2012 on Windows, yes? Then you can render it with the Windows version of Mental Ray, yes/no?

In which respect is the new mentalray better? Do you think a difference in rendering (besides maybe cpu time and IO) is significant as far as the final product is concerned?

I've never really done any rendering but on povray, but I'd like to take a look at this.

Allow myself to correct... myself. The current version of Mental Ray is 3.10.1.2, released January 17th 2012, the release notes: http://docs.autodesk.com/MENTALRAY/2013/ENU/mental-ray-help/files/relnotes/relnotes.html