Hardware for smooth work

General Moho topics.

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Jedi
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Hardware for smooth work

Post by Jedi »

I'm building a new PC and wondering what specs Moho 12 needs to work fast and smooth.
Main question is intel or ryzen?
Also how important is RAM and GPU?
My budget is about $1000 if that can help.
chucky
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Re: Hardware for smooth work

Post by chucky »

Important all of these things are Padawan.
Fast must your computer be.
Powerful, should be your GPU.
Not much will $1000.00 buy you on my planet, youngling.

Want should you, UNLIMITED POWER! :mrgreen:
theoscartoons
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Re: Hardware for smooth work

Post by theoscartoons »

There is not much to to be found regarding the hardware and Moho. I am doing some research now. In fact there should be a whole new Forum category on this subject. It's important and it can save folks a lot of time and money. Some of the questions I have deal alot with the GPU (graphics card) because you can get really carried away and it can be an overkill for Moho. For example is there really any difference in performance between a GPU of 2, 4 or 8 GB with Moho? Does Moho use CUDA cores? Is there a major difference in performance on Moho between a memory bandwidth for the GPU of 50 GB/s and 240 GB/s. As you can tell from my questions I do recognize the graphics card matters...but to what extent?
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Greenlaw
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Re: Hardware for smooth work

Post by Greenlaw »

I haven't found Moho to be terribly demanding on gear. To me, working in Moho, even on a modest laptop computer, seems really speedy. But that's probably because my background had mainly been in 3D and vfx compositing, where I could spend many hours, even days, setting up scenes and rendering. By comparison, most of my Moho scenes take a few seconds to several minutes to render entire scenes.

The hardware considerations should depend on your designs and whether you break out your scenes or insist on rendering everything 'in-camera'. You should also think about what other programs you may want to use that could more demanding than Moho.

For me, it's all about the RAM. Get more of it if you use a lot of bitmap art. Rendering high-re bitmaps (2k, 4k, and higher,) can gobble up your RAM and drag the system down to a crawl if you don't have enough RAM to support it.

If you plan to work entirely in vectors or use only limited, lower res bitmaps (i.e, texture fills), you can get away with a lot less RAM. For example, HLF looks like it uses a lot of hi-res bitmaps but it was animated and rendered on a small 4GB laptop. This is because most of the art was actually vectors with lower-res, seamlessly tiling texture fills. If I had used actual hi-res bitmaps, I would not have been able to render this animation on the laptop.

However, there was an aspect to this project which did require a lot more RAM and CPU power. The 'Moho' part went very smoothly on the laptop because I used bitmaps in a limited way but also because I relied heavily on Layer Comps, which means I could easily break out a scene into simpler passes using the Layer Comps tools. A typical scene had one or two 'character' layer comps; 'FG', 'MG', 'BG', and 'Sky' layer comps for environment layers; and special matte passes if I felt I needed them. Even though this meant creating more renders, it also meant the individual tasks were much simpler for Moho, and it also meant rendering revisions were usually very fast to render (assuming camera choreography did not change.)

Where things got gnarly for me was everything after Moho. I mostly broke out and composited the project in After Effects so I could add a lot of optical effects like DOF, motion blur and lighting tricks. All of this was very CPU intensive, and also RAM intensive because I rendered the entire project at 1080p as per the client's request. This really challenged my home workstation which only had 9GB of RAM at the time. I recall AE crashed in the middle of rendering often after I applied AE's Pixel Motion Blur. Fortunately, since I rendered to image sequence, I could just pick up the renders where I left off. Once I got my final composited renders, AE easily handled compiling the final movie files needed for editorial.

After that project, I upgraded my RAM to 18 GB and haven't run into this problem since.

At work, my computer has about 40GB of RAM, but I can push the limit there by keeping Moho, AE and Photoshop open at the same time.

So, short version: Get as much RAM as you can possibly afford. There are ways to work with less RAM but life can be much easier when you have more.
Last edited by Greenlaw on Fri Aug 11, 2017 5:39 pm, edited 7 times in total.
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Greenlaw
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Re: Hardware for smooth work

Post by Greenlaw »

One more thing: if you intend to integrate 3D in your projects, you'll want a fast CPU and a decent graphics card with a fast GPU and plenty of on-board RAM. (Almost any modern Nvidia gaming card will do.) If you want to use dynamics and other physics based tools, a fast GPU may come in handy. A lot of tools in compositing can also benefit from a fast GPU. I would check with the specs of your tools. Some popular tools only actually use the CPU.

In the case of Moho, I'm not sure Moho really benefits too much from GPU. As a matter of fact, I usually have Moho's GPU acceleration disabled.

A fast GPU has been good, though, for other things I need to do on my computer. For example, I like to use motion capture in some of my work, and the software I use relies heavily on a fast GPU for tracking.
Last edited by Greenlaw on Fri Aug 11, 2017 5:31 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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synthsin75
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Re: Hardware for smooth work

Post by synthsin75 »

I'm not sure the minimum GPU, but you definitely need a dedicated graphics card...not just integrated.
theoscartoons
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Re: Hardware for smooth work

Post by theoscartoons »

What graphics card are you using?
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synthsin75
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Re: Hardware for smooth work

Post by synthsin75 »

NVIDIA GeForce GTX 970M
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dueyftw
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Re: Hardware for smooth work

Post by dueyftw »

I do animation as a hobby. So for me the CPU isn't as important as a good graphics card. I need monitors with high resolution. I'm working on a crappy laptop, but I have a second monitor. I could use a third and a forth. Moho is a screen hog. There been days when I wish that I could turn my second monitor sideways like a tablet so I can see all the layers.

Dale
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synthsin75
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Re: Hardware for smooth work

Post by synthsin75 »

dueyftw wrote:Moho is a screen hog. There been days when I wish that I could turn my second monitor sideways like a tablet so I can see all the layers.
If you're on Windows, you can rotate any connected monitor: https://www.laptopmag.com/articles/fix- ... n-computer
dkwroot
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Re: Hardware for smooth work

Post by dkwroot »

I would suggest focusing your money on buying a good cpu and fast ram. Keep in mind that Moho uses a maximum of 4 cores, so you want to get a cpu with a high clock speed and really good individual core performance. I would suggest Intel over amd for this reason, since amd tends to rely on core numbers rather than individual core performance.

16 GB of DDR4 ram should also really help. The GPU isn't that important since Moho doesn't push it very hard. I would suggest anything from a 750 ti to a 1050 ti.

Specifically, I would suggest getting an i5 7600k and a really good water cooling block. Also, get a motherboard that's good at overclocking. When you get the cpu, test overclocking settings until you find a sweet spot. I personally overclock to about 4.5 ghz on an old i5 2500k and my old cpu still does really well with Moho.
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dueyftw
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Re: Hardware for smooth work

Post by dueyftw »

synthsin75 wrote:
dueyftw wrote:Moho is a screen hog. There been days when I wish that I could turn my second monitor sideways like a tablet so I can see all the layers.
If you're on Windows, you can rotate any connected monitor: https://www.laptopmag.com/articles/fix- ... n-computer
Thanks for the information. I got an animation that I need to adjust about 60 time lines at the same time.

Dale
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Greenlaw
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Re: Hardware for smooth work

Post by Greenlaw »

dueyftw wrote:I do animation as a hobby. So for me the CPU isn't as important as a good graphics card. I need monitors with high resolution. I'm working on a crappy laptop, but I have a second monitor. I could use a third and a forth. Moho is a screen hog. There been days when I wish that I could turn my second monitor sideways like a tablet so I can see all the layers.

Dale
Yes, I wish the workspace layout was more flexible too. To make the best of it, I undock Styles to free up more space for the Layers panel. IMO, even when Styles is collapsed, it takes up way too much screen space from the Layers panel. I normally keep Styles on a second monitor, as well as the Actions, Layers Settings and Keyframe panels. Sometimes I wish I could just put all of of these in a single panel with tabs at the top, so I could keep them on the same monitor. (This would be ideal on a mobile tablet or small laptop computer where Moho's screen usage it almost impractical. Tabs, I say! We need more tabs!) :)

Or if not tabs, I would love to be able to collapse and expand the panels like window shades by toggle-clicking their title bars. This way, the can take very little screen space until you need them.
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synthsin75
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Re: Hardware for smooth work

Post by synthsin75 »

Greenlaw wrote:Or if not tabs, I would love to be able to collapse and expand the panels like window shades by toggle-clicking their title bars. This way, the can take very little screen space until you need them.
Have you tried out just opening/closing undocked windows with their shortcuts? That's the fastest way I know to hide/show them where you want.
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InfoCentral
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Re: Hardware for smooth work

Post by InfoCentral »

My suggestion:

Ryzen 1700X
Gigabyte GTX 1050 Ti 4GB
ASRock X370 Taichi

Memory, case, power supply, cpu cooling, to taste. More memory is better. Faster memory is better. Both increase cost. Budget accordingly.
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