I have got a project to accomplish through solidworks. I am replicating hybrid poly tunnels and there assembly steps in solidworks animation. My complete model caries about 1500 bodies. In regards to the (rendered) animation, my current "average" second hand pc can't not perform. It's taking me 8 hours to render a 16 second animation (granted all components have motion) and the (avi) playback is jumpy and regularly doesn't include all the small detailing. This is at 20fps. I need to know what my optimum pc conditions would be to utilise the full capability and rendering speed /quality of solidworks and it's animations. I'm at a budget of $2000 (without the monitor) give or take.
Any advice is muchly appreciated as I wish to purchase the appropriate gear!
Daniel,
You probably ran out of memory with only 4 gigs of ram. When running straight to AVI, PV360 has to hold all the frames in ram before it compiles and saves the AVI.
You are pretty challenged from a compute horsepower perspective. A very weak system all the way around. Look at the March 2014 suggested computer thread. This will put you way ahead of your current system.
http://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?cpu=Intel+Core+i5+650+%40+3.20GHz
https://forum.solidworks.com/thread/78834?tstart=0
Select the option to save individual frames when you save of the animation. Instead of selecting avi select an image file type. You can use software such as Windows Movie Maker, Quicktime, VirtualDub, Adobe Premiere, etc to compile the frames into a movie.
Another option for you if you have access to your work computers after hours (with PV360 available) is to setup the animation to run on multiple machines. Render out different parts of the timeline as images on each machine. You will have to make sure all your render settings are the same on each machine. Unfortunately, a lot of the render settings are machine specific not file specific.
Cheers,
Anna