Hi there,
We are an interior design company getting into the world of 3d modelling and rendering with Vectorworks. We do reasonably basic interior models with Vectorworks and we are working hard to perfect our renders through Renderworks to give the best presentations to our clients. We also have a number of projects coming up where our joinery needs to be incorporated into architect's buildings and be made BIM compatible. We currently all run reasonably new 27" 5k retina Imacs, with 3.4 GHz Intel Core i5 processors and 16gb ram, which has been ok so far, but we are finding render times can sometimes be up to 2-3 days long, and we've had a few crashes. Therefore we'd like to purchase one new Imac that can handle anything we can throw at it on Vectorworks, and also maximise render times. We are looking at an Imac pro as these seem to be very highly spec'd, but we are not sure how much we need to spend to get the best results. Is it worth upgrading from the base 8 core processor to more cores (they go up to 18) The clock speeds all seem to be similar, and correct me if I'm wrong but I think the clock speed is the key for rendering times, rather than the number of cores? Also there are two options with the graphics cards; one with 8gb of HBM2 memory and one with 16gb, so is that worth the upgrade? Money isn't really an object, but at the same time we don't want to spend 3-4k on upgrades if they aren't going to make a difference.
Any help would be greatly appreciated!
Chris.