[Brandon Davidson]

Glad you liked it!

[Brandon Davidson]

I don’t know Maya at all and I’ve only ever used Blender, but I know you have to export the obj as triangles and that if a section ever appears blank from Blender you need to either select “draw backfaces” in Element or go back into Blender and recalculate the normals. I don’t know if that would be helpful or not…

[Brandon Davidson]

This tutorial might be helpful. He explains how to place green screen footage into a 3D scene as a 2D layer. Sort of the same concept as adding footage to your spaceship.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CQGdydXxn8s

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[Brandon Davidson]

[Alex Gerulaitis] “One of the most popular configuration for After Effects consists of two volumes:
– (1) an SSD for OS and apps, with a folder dedicated to After Effects CS6 Global Performance Cache
– (2) a media volume (single drive, RAID0, 1 or 5) for, well, media.”

I really appreciate the feedback. That helped immensely.

[Brandon Davidson]

I truly appreciate everyone’s input and comments and I feel much more informed about choosing my next computer. I’m still not sure where I’m leaning but I feel much more open to giving PC a try if I’m willing to deal with a new OS and workflow. Thanks again for everyone’s time and effort in helping me out!

[Brandon Davidson]

Walter Soyka: “To provide a little counterpoint, I started adding PCs to my little Mac-based studio for full-time creative work a year and a half ago when I got a Z800 from HP to evaluate in cross-platform workflows.”
——
Thanks Walter. It is good to hear that you have experience with both macs and pcs and that the pc’s have been a good experience for you as well. What makes me a little nervous is I’m not terribly knowledgeable on computers and so if I run into problems I need to turn to forums and such and they turn into big headaches (which isn’t a big deal once in a while). I was wondering if the ENVY would give me lots of problems or if it would be reliable. It’s good to know at least the HP workstations work well and hopefully that would translate into their ENVY desktop as well.

[Brandon Davidson]

Mathew Woods: “On my recommendation, our studio invested in a fancy Pro-Max One about a year ago because of no new mac pros and we have had no end of trouble with it. Its nice and fast when it works, but it has had a number of problems, has been much harder to maintain”
———-

That is my biggest concern by far on switching to a PC. I’ve had problems with my macs before and I expect to have problems with a PC as well, but if it’s going to be a constant hassle of problems I definitely do not want to switch. I was hoping someone might have had a chance to work with ENVY desktops in the past to see if this would be the case or not. Thanks for the input.

[Brandon Davidson]

“When you upgrade, you don’t need to buy a perpetual license for the same OS that you were using before; you can buy one for another OS.”
————-

Thanks for the quick response. Just to clarify, if I purchase the PC perpetual license CS6 UPGRADE, I would just need to punch in the product code for my mac CS5.5 version, and it would update (or would the pc software look for the CS5.5 and say I can’t install it because it’s not on the pc computer)?

[Brandon Davidson]

“I haven’t worked with Envy desktops but they look like a good buy, especially that they come with a 2-year warranty. Not sure if that 3-drive RAID5 is a good idea – but then again, I haven’t worked with it.

How’s HP’s return policy on these systems? Perhaps you could get one, test the heck out of it and see if you’re happy?

If you end up getting one, please share your findings – I am very curious how it holds up.

Alex Gerulaitis”
———–

Thanks for the comment. If I get the computer I will let you know how my experience goes with it. On the 3 drive raid 5, I’m not very familiar with hard drives and how they work except that a raid is supposed to be redundant to help not lose data. Is there a different setup you might recommend? No worries if you’re not sure, but I just thought I might ask…

They offer the following choices for the ENVY desktop:
2TB 7200 rpm SATA hard drive
2TB 7200rpm SATA RAID 0 (2 x 1TB HDD) +$50.00
2TB 7200RPM SATA RAID 5 (3 x 1TB HDD) +$50.00
2TB 7200 rpm SATA 1st hard drive plus ExpressCache HP 16GB Disk Cache SSD +$100.00
3TB 7200 rpm SATA hard drive +$100.00
2TB 7200rpm SATA RAID 1 (2 x 2TB HDD) +$100.00
3TB 7200 rpm SATA 1st hard drive plus ExpressCache HP 16GB Disk Cache SSD +$200.00
256GB Solid state drive +$200.00
4TB 7200RPM SATA RAID 5 (3 x 2TB HDD) +$300

Are they all kind of sixes in terms of speed? and just different sizes. Will the solid state drive work the fastest (but only 256GB be a little hindering)? Sorry I don’t mean to ask a million questions and expect all the answers, but if you have any thoughts I would appreciate it. Thanks.

[Brandon Davidson]

Thanks for the input. That was one of my concerns with the PC was that I was going to have to deal with a lot more bloatware and viruses than you usually have to deal with on a mac. I’m encouraged to hear a mac user switched over and liked the experience. Money is a big issue for me and that by far is the biggest draw for me to switch to a pc…