MBPr for Digital Art/ Animation?

I have been asking around and I have recently been told that for digital art, the Retina MBP is the best choice because of the display. I am nervous of making the choice of going for the MBP for a few reasons:

It's expensive, where the price is based on the quality of the screen, thinness, etc. and since I really don't have a job now I would be investing all my money made when I do get a job into this laptop. Also it's important to know that I also wanted to do animation sort of as my primary thing but I won't start with that for a while down the road in college (estimating 4 years from now) where I'd want to do digital art a bit sooner. I also want to be able to game occasionally since my current laptop is not very capable of doing that (I will test run League of Legends to test the performance). The other focus of buying a new laptop is, in addition, to replace my 4 year old Dell Inspiron 1525, which at the time was more of a budget notebook but now I'm looking for a more usable machine.

So for my wants and needs for my computer, would the Retina MBP be worth it's steep price point?

 

it depends alot on what software you want to get into using, the size of your projects etc, your mobility needs and how fast you need to render on it.

is it the best choice for display ..... thats very debatable and seems to be user preference. IMO its not especially until more applications are coded to deal with the resolution or it is essentially a standard 900 or 1200 display.

now I dont do much animation ( architectural renders sometimes )... im a video editor. SPACE becomes a concern very rapidly and unless you like carrying an external drive or 2. in addition to your laptop which lowers your mobility factor.

now for your rendering .... depending on your application you could be looking at an unforseen issue ... the Nvidia Kepler GPU's which are mediocre at using CUDA to accellerate renderings and is absolutly HORRID in OpenCL ( as in 30-40% slower than its predecessors ) in both OSX and windows.

if you could give me a list of the applications etc and estimated project sizes I would be happy to try and help you but its hard without knowing more specifics.

 

List of applications, unknown at the time as well as est. project size. These are things that I would find out once I get into it more, but like I said, my current hardware has held me back from getting into anything of that nature really. I would have to research what programs I would use and all other things.

 

the less you know about your own requirements, the less sense in making a huge investment up front.

The rMBP is a nice laptop, it's also very expensive. You can certainly find something that will fit your needs for less money. The display is very good, in particular for digital art, but it's not the absolute best display available nor is it the most cost effective.

For animation (which may involve high-end rendering, but strictly speaking does not) you need a good GPU, but you don't need to worry about CUDA or OpenCL or anything like that. You just need a decent processor and a decent graphics card, and then a nice high resolution display. If money isn't a big deal, you don't have to worry about the rMBP letting you down, but if money is tight, you can absolutely find something cheaper.

 

funny, I us MAYA, it LOVES a good OpenCL card
Maya - System Requirements - Autodesk

Blenger uses GL primarily, see good spec or production spec
blender.org - System Requirements

oh heck lets toss in all of autodesks animation tools

Animation Software - 3D Animation Programs - Autodesk
some actually barely work on any consumer GPU and are locked to Quadros and fire pros.

as I said knowing your apps are important. also note alot of apps will need you to run windows too. eg softimage is win/linux
3DsMax is windows or virtualized which is SLOW I found. Motionbuilder is win only .......

 

For what you would spend on a RMBP, you can get an extremely powerful Windows workstation that will be able to handle just about any project you throw at it. You would also benefit from a display that has more accurate color, not to mention applications that are optimized for the more standard resolution of 1920x1080.

Not to say the Mac won't work but it likely is not the best choice. Again you really need to know what software you will be using.


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

 

If you're rich go with the Retina Macbook Pro. If not, you can buy a laptop with similar specs and 1080p for around half of what you would pay for the Retina.

I went to school for 3d modeling/animation and my laptop had intel integrated at the time. I ran into no problems, I always setup 3ds max to not use the built in card and use software instead.

 

That link doesn't have any mention of OpenCL. And OpenCL isn't very widely used for animation workflows even with plugins in Maya. You could certainly find OpenCL rendering plugins for Maya, but that doesn't have much to do with the workflow of animating. If you want high quality rendering, a good choice would be to get a separate computer to offload that work. You can set maya up for this seamlessly.

 

I found a list of programs that would be used at one of the colleges I'm applying to, though help me on which are Mac/PC exclusive:

Adobe Photoshop, Adobe Illustrator, and Corel Painter (Illustration & Digital Artwork). Photoshop, Painter, Adobe After Effects, Premiere or Final Cut Pro for video editing, iStopmotion, Soundtrack Pro, Cinema 4D, and Zbrush (Animation).

The person I talked to also recommended that I not make a major purchase till my junior year in college, however I am interested in doing freehand Illustration work possibly.

Also the computers they use are Mac Pros, but they also stated students have both Macs and PC's

 

Any Adobe app can be had/used under Windows or OSx, Zbrush and Cinema 4d also. Final cut pro, Soundtrack Pro, iStopmotion seems to be the only ones OSx exlusive.

Because the laptop you would be getting, will be your main working computer as i understand it, i would be looking at it as if i was buying a machine to get my work done. I would focus more on the one's with most power and reliability for the money, and that would be for me: Lenovo W530, Dell 6700/4700 and a MBPr last of them all.

I would be extra careful about the MBPr as it seems to have heat issues... if the numbers are right, having temratures close and even over 100c is not good at all.

 

I certainly wouldn't worry about any of this until at least until you get accepted into the program you are applying to.