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Is blender a blunder?

Posted: September 08, 2011
flamesart
For the past 3 weeks now I've been learning/ utilizing blender for the purpose of rendering private aircraft interiors at my job. My first excersise was to render the tradeshow display (full sized cross section of an interior, complete with carpet, cabinets, chairs, sidewall paneling, and bulkheads ) It seemed too good to be true being a free program, untill I tried to put all the objects together. It bogged down tremendeously majorly slowing productivity. I completed it but minus a bulkhead and the table. It bogged down so much at that point it wouldn't allow me to move objects/ make selections. I took part of the project home on a disc to see how it would fare on my Imac, not too much better...
There are many parts to this rendering. All the parts created in seperate files, with future intentions of the more general pieces to be "plugged in" other aircraft renderings. I have 3 textures, two from photoshop ( woodgrain and fabric) and one created in the program (carpet/clouds). I also have mirror pieces that go on each of the bulkheads.
I've joined the smaller pieces together into one object ( joined all the chair parts together to have a "chair file" ) in attempt to fix the problem. I've also reduced the amount of smoothing and subsurface mod too. I couldn't get away with it on the rounded objects though (windowpanel) without the piece looking courgated.
From the information I've gathered on the blender forums the program requires tons of ram, memory cpu, etc. twice of what i have.
The computer work provided for me is as follows..

Dell inspiron 260 PC
Intel R core i5-2310
cpu 2.90 ghz
8.00 bit ram
64 bit operating system
windows 7 "service pack"
intel R HD graphics family

Unfortunately work is not willling to have an uber computer built just to run blender, considering they where told this computer is the beefiest on the market. So my million dollar question is this, do ALL 3d programs require an astounding amount of ram, cpu, and video card to run efficiently? Or is blender an exception due to it's open source affliction?
Posted: September 08, 2011
flamesart
Oops! it's a dell inspiron.... 620! got that backwards...
Posted: November 18, 2011
realspace3d
I think your problem is probably just the graphics card. It really is not that big of an investment. Even something like this the NVidia GTX 560. Generall go for around $200, or the ATI competitor would solve your problems. We have used Blender, Maya, 3D Max, SketchUp, Revit, and others. Although there are minor performance differences between them all 3D programs require a good graphics card.
Posted: February 08, 2012
jgironmedia
I've seen some great work done in Blender. You should check out the short film Sintel. Very sad.
Posted: March 01, 2012
3d artist gallery markshires
From what I have done in Blender, you need to learn a lot of shortcuts and it is possible to achieve everything you can in most other packages.
Posted: March 28, 2012
3d artist gallery Andyba
Intel R HD graphics is not suitable for 3d production.
You need a dedicated graphics card for this. For blender it is better to use nvidia cards, because the new renderer Cycles can use its CUDA and dramatically increase render times.
Posted: March 31, 2012
inlitestudio
Ive actually found blender to be the most light on resources in comparison to other 3d packages, but It would seem that graphics is your problem here, definitely need a dedicated Nvidia chipset at the very least