On Thu, Feb 21, 2008 at 4:33 PM, Sam Douglas <
sam.douglas32@gmail.com> wrote:
Regarding the 3D graphics; if he is into doing pre-rendered 3D
animation and stuff, the graphics card doesn't have to be extremely
juicy: Blender (arguably the best tool for the use case you described)
uses OpenGL for the interface of the program and the viewports, but
the actual rendering process for the final image/animation does not
use a graphics card at all. CPU and memory for that.
At this stage he is looking at 3d stills rather than animations. Thanks for the tip about Blender
As for 2D art, for vector drawing, Inkscape isn't bad, and if you
don't have a problem with using partially proprietary software; Xara
Xtreme is available for GNU/Linux (the program itself is under the
GPL, but the rendering engine is under a proprietary license of some
description).
As for graphics tablets; most if not all the Wacom tablets are
supported by X and programs like The Gimp. They have a fairly wide
range of models available to suit needs/prices. Never really looked
into support for other tablets, Wacom seem by far the most common.
Following your comment I've looked into the Wacom tablets and they seem to be very reasonably priced and pretty much exactly what he's looking for. The Ubuntu site also has a very good howto for Wacom tablets as well. The later "bamboo" range of tablets apparently need some development drivers that need a manual install but the howto seems pretty comprehensive and I'm sure we can manage to get the drivers working.
For the hardware, an Intel Core 2 Duo system is probably the best
choice, probably look at the 2.66GHz clock speeds. Past that, and for
quad core systems the prices go up a lot, and you honestly wouldn't
see a huge performance increase except in heavy duty ray-tracing jobs
(but that could be distributed to his old P4 if performance was really
critical. Which it normally isn't).
Personally I'm an AMD fanboi but the core duos are better performance overall according to what I've read on Toms and Ars. He is planning on "recycling" the p4 when they've upgraded by reinstalling it and donating to one of the schemes that give computers to underprivileged kids.
As Glen suggested, I went onto Ascent and with a little modification,
a fairly reasonably system can be priced out to about $1800, including
a 17" LCD monitor and 6" by 9" Wacom graphics tablet.
I guessed he would need about $1500-$2K so it seems I was pretty much in the ballpark.
Thank you!