Hello, I will be transferring to a school for a degree in 3D modeling and animation in a few weeks and to go there it is a requirement to have your own laptop. Before I went out and bought one I wanted to find out what an industry standard laptop would be for a career and 3D modeling and animation in the gaming industry. If anyone has any suggestions that would be very helpful. Thanks! Alex

If you are a big spender seek a workstation laptop..
If not, atleast pamper yourself with atleast 1GB of memory.

Moving to the hardware forum.

3D modelling programs are behemoths that chew up ungodly amounts of RAM. Arithma's right about the 1 GB minimum. I'd also suggest that you get one with a well-known (ATI or NVIDIA) graphics chipset, so that there's no chance of annoying hardware-specific glitches with your modelling program. CPU's important, but you don't need top-of-the-line and you don't need multicore.

Quote: Original post by Sneftel
and you don't need multicore.

Need, no? Want, probably you do if you're going to be doing lots of renders. Multi-cores perform significantly faster than single cores; the quad-cores are ~4x faster to software render than the single core (there are benchmarks somewhere on Tom's Hardware).

But this adds significant cost to the computer. If you can afford it, IMHO, it's worth it.

-me