What kind of computers do animators use?

Answer 1

Animators use a wide variety of computers, so it is difficult to simply declare a certain type of computer that animators use. Many of them use windows, but there is a growing number of professional animators that switch to using macintoshes.

The above is very good; my wife and I both do animation. We mostly use Flash MX 2004, Adobe Photoshop and digital video composited in Adobe Premier as an aid in animating. Our computers are HP pavillion 2.4 ghz, 2gb of RAM, ATI 512mb video card and run windows XP. It works great even with the digital video - we have several external 250gb hard drives because animation can really eat up storage space specially when using digital video - we also have several sony external disc drives for burning DVD movies. I would suggest a quality sound system if you expect any of your viewers to be using the same, even if you use mp3 or similar compressed audio, you want to know what they will hear - also buy the best monitor you can afford for the same reason.

Really big animation shops like Dreamworks and Pixar also use render farm systems. A render farm is a bank of computers running (usually) Pixar RenderMan, and they're controlled by one central computer. When you launch a render on one of these, the central computer passes out render tasks to all the other computers in the farm. When one finishes a frame, it returns the frame to the central machine and takes another. Render farm machines don't even have monitors.