CAD/Maya Questions

I feel kinda silly as a mod. posting this, but no one knows everything and I'm no exception I need to know some facts about CAD and AutoCAD (and maybe Maya too) for those of you who use it out there. Next year, I'm going to be taking a few courses that require these programs, and was wondering how much space would you recommend for a HD? I have about 45GBs of space left in my HD, but was planning on purchasing a portable external HD if necessary (I probably would've thought about a desktop external, but I didn't like the fact of having to have an extra outlet and having to go home and dump and load data onto my notebook every night). I know Auto/CAD itself requires about 5GBs of space to install, but how large does a typical file size run for each? I've also taken a look at the min. system requirements and think my notebook will be able to squeak by in the graphics department, but may need an upgrade in the amount of RAM I have. What do you guys suggest (FYI, I'm only taking a high school/college prep course if that has any impact)?

 

If you're just taking classes, you probably have enough drive space with 45GB. The programs themselves aren't huge. What will take the space is rendering, especially to video, which is were the external drive comes in handy. The actual source files/models are relatively tame (just lists of vertices and such, essentially), unless you have insane textures or animations and so on. In a classroom setting, not often the case. What do you mean you're going to squeak by on the hardware requirements? You should be fine with a gig and a quarter of RAM. What you'll primarily want to do is just kill all applications before using Maya/AudoCAD. But you are right, the RAM is the first thing you want to upgrade if things get slow FYI, I have run Maya in a limited basis on a desktop machine with 1GB of RAM. It worked flawlessly.

 

Well, I'm just worried because I'm also taking digital photography, and Photoshop files eat space like none other. I was wondering if CAD/Maya files did the same. Thanks for the info. Pitabred!

 

For classes, I don't think you need much space. I'm a Civil Enginneer so I have worked with Autocad before. I have a Latitude with a 10 GB drive and it was enough for the things I did in college so I don't think you'll eat up the whole 45GB with Autocad. I can't speak for Photshop though.

 

Well, I can't really speak for Maya, but for a general CAD class, you should be perfectly fine with 45GB of space. I have all my old AutoCAD and SolidEdge files saved on a 64MB flash drive with a bunch of other stuff too. Many of them are just small drawings; nothing too intense, but that's the way it usually is with introduction CAD classes. The biggest thing as noted will be if you get into rendering and things like that. They'll take up space, but you typically won't do stuff like that in your first CAD class.

And believe me, your specs will be more than enough for CAD. AutoCAD runs on pretty much anything. Actually, the AutoCAD lab at our school has really old Dell Precision computers with 256MB of RAM, 16MB integrated graphics cards, 4gig hard drives and Pentium 2 processors. And we run SolidEdge on those computers too. They're both slow, yes, but your E1705 blows those things out of the water in terms of performance. I think your biggest obstacle will be with Maya. That may give you some problems, but again, I don't have experience with that.

 

Thanks zicky and notebook_ftw for the info. on CAD/Maya However, I think I may need to get a portable external HD anyway because of Photoshop :/ Each file runs about 20-50MBs and I've eaten up 2GBs just fiddling with it and some of my pictures. Its either that or save photos in JPEG. I think I may get another GB of RAM before school starts though, just to make sure for Maya.

 

yes, it's not the software you have to worry about. it's the size of the files you're dealing with which is totally dependant on the project you're working on.

obviously if you're working with a 30 second 3d animated clip versus a 2 hour clip, you'll have different needs.

 

50MB files, xAMDvsIntelx? What are you doing with them? Because I have a 175MB TIF file here, but that's an aerial image of most of Colorado at something like 10ft resolution. You working on images that are 1/3rd the size of Colorado?

 

They're 360 degree panoramic saved in PSD format. The original files are from an 8MP camera.

I don't think I'll be working on clips 2 hours in length, probably only 5-15 minutes max. Our school's hoping to re-enter the DARPA's Autonomous vehicle Urban Challenge (if it even happens). We were the only high school entering the darn thing and Standford won the last challenge.

 

Yeah, photoshop files are pretty huge. I took some pictures earlier this year with my friend's 7MP Samsung and added some blurring and other effects, not too much, with CS2 and the files were pretty large. Like over 20MB. Hell of a program though.

 

you should be fine with 45 gb free, maya stores files as vectors so they are relatively small... the things that would take up space are the texture files (depends on your texture resolution) and the rendered image sequence...
but 45 gb is more than enough for a class