Budget Desktop for Advanced Viewport Animation Work

Hello!

I apologize if I come off wrong. I am new here. Normally I would be able to figure out this kind of stuff on my own, but I am a little strapped for time right now and was hoping I could get a little direction on a purchase I need to decide on in less than a month.

Normally I am in the laptop market. I am a huge fan of ultrabooks as I use it for on the go multimedia, game dev, and academics. Right now I am using a Yoga 2 Pro with a i7-4500 which I had for two years and it is still kicking butt with nearly everything I’ve thrown at it, which includes music production, video editing, plenty of toolchains and compilers, Matlab, and even enough Blender to suffice for basic video game character animation. However, it is about time I start investing in a solid desktop to do more 3D intensive tasks as well as be able to test out some games I may help develop.

More importantly, I have a few CGI animation projects in mind that I want to make sure this new desktop can handle. Problem is, I have a tight budget at the moment of around $500 with $800 max for a really good solution. I know it is hardly enough to realize a significant performance increase over my laptop to start with, but I plan to invest more into it as I obtain the funds. So I want whatever I get to be easily expandable/upgradeable if at all possible.

For my animation projects, I am targeting a realistic/anime hybrid art-style. I’m not too concerned with hyper-realistic colors and textures, but I am concerned with physics simulations to add a lot motion and dynamics. This means I will be simulating hair, cloth, fur, and some rigid-body physics as well as nature. For the most part I should be able to do most of my animation work with the fur and nature simulations (such as grass) disabled, but for a girl’s hair (I’m going just a a little more realistic than anime poly hair) and poly curves with soft bodies for spline ik, I need as close to real-time performance. I have no ideas where cloth will sit in all of this. I haven’t used cloth sims for games yet. However, trying to run a cloth sim on a current model I am working on really drags my laptop down. I know at the latest Blender conference someone had a much more efficient cloth sim running, but who knows when that will be implemented?

I will be using a few particle systems, especially smoke and dust during fight scenes. I also will need fluid sims on occasion.

So my first question is, is it possible to build a budget desktop that can handle all of these edits in the viewport without much slow down? I’m not asking about rending, just straight up editing and animating.

If so, where would you suggest me to invest the majority of my resources towards? Do I go for a really heavy CPU? Do I get a discrete GPU? What do you recommend for parts, especially if I plan to slowly expand down the road?

I’'m willing to go closer to the $800 range if I can set up the computer to use completely separate resources for rendering and editing, so that I can continue to work while rendering (since most likely my renders will take close to 3 weeks or more to complete). I know this is possible in larger budget setups, but I doubt it is in mine. Is it possible to run the viewport using an intel integrated GPU while a discrete GPU is rendering?

Lastly, if I do try to get a GPU into this build, I definitely think I would like to go with high VRAM for future-proofing in case my rig does allow me to do GPU rendering in the future. Right now the AMD R390 looks really slick for that purpose, although the lack of volumetric support could pose some obstacles for the fight scenes. If I did go the AMD R390 route, I would probably have to get an SSD drive to be able to quickly shutdown and cold boot (since I hear that card doesn’t idle all that well) to save power.

While on the topic of other parts, if you do have suggestions for other parts such as casing, cooling, power, and such, I would love to hear them! As for motherboards, I plan to go with 2x8gb RAM with two spare RAM slots to eventually expand to 32 gigs if necessary. I don’t think I will need 64 gigs before I need to upgrade the motherboard. Definitely suggest a motherboard that goes with your CPU recommendation.

Sorry for the extremely long post. I wanted to be as clear as possible on what I am trying to achieve. Again, normally I would be able to figure this out on my own, but it is hard for me to judge lately as I don’t have a lot of benchmarks to go off of other than still-frame cars that have nothing to do with physics nor animation.

Please feel free to provide suggestions and criticism; and don’t be afraid to let me know if my post was too long!