People often think of computers as all in one tool. But anyone with specialized academic or professional needs usually require something more from their computers.

In particular, anything involving Animation requires extra CPU power, graphics acceleration, RAM, storage space and specialized focus.

This is why finding the best 2D, and 3D animation laptops for animators and students often proves difficult. All of the previously mentioned features need to push past the general expectations.

While many laptops do so with one or two of these features, it’s harder to narrow it down to choices featuring all of them. The following items are the best 2D and 3D animation laptops for animators and students due to strength in all of the mentioned criteria.

Some of them weigh more heavily to students, professionals, 2D or 3D. But all of them weigh in strongly enough within the important metrics to be an acceptable choice.

Best laptop for animation students 2018

The Microsoft Surface book 2 matches artistic needs reasonably easily when looking at raw specs. It ships with a minimum of 8 GB RAM.

This is roughly double the standard amount for general purpose laptops. And one can choose to double even that for a full 16 GB RAM. This is ideal for animation students as it allows for multiple active editing tasks.

Animation students can work on larger video files. And they can directly edit multiple frames within those files at the same time.

It also features up to 1 TB local storage. Again, this is especially useful when working with an animation’s multiple frames.

One can fold the laptop into three different modes. It has a laptop mode which is ideal for advanced editing.

But it also features a folded studio or tablet mode which one can then use to simulate working with drawing tools or sculpting material.

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Best gaming laptop for animation 2018

The MSI G65’s is the best gaming laptop for animation in part due to the available RAM. 4 GB is usually considered as the lower side of average for notebooks.

But the MSI G65 has 16 GB available ram by default. And the built-in NVIDIA GeForce GTX1060 graphics card ensures 3D modeling and display can work with that significant amount of memory.

These features match perfectly with the laptop’s strong VR support. It’s a gaming laptop that doesn’t just give people a chance to play games.

But also an opportunity to work with 3D assets in real time while seeing how they’d look in immersive VR based environments. The high level of RAM and powerful graphics system essentially allows for both design and rendering programs to work at the same time.

And that’s true even when using system intensive features such as the latest implementations of VR.

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Best laptop for 3D animation 2018

The Dell XPS 9570 is the best choice for 3D animation. One substantial reason can be found within the processor. It runs at 4.1 GHz, which is quite a bit faster than the average desktop system.

This speed is useful for the amount of general processing needed within most 3D design applications. Display of these results is also enhanced with 100% Adobe RGB color.

3D animation often requires extra attention to even small details involving color or shading. The 100% Adobe RGB color ensures that 3D models appear natural and lifelike within 3D environments.

It comes with 16 GB RAM, which dramatically impacts 3D animation. A significant amount of RAM matches up perfectly with the fact that animation requires multiple frames.

Each of those frames, in turn, consuming a fair amount of memory. The Dell XPS ensures that even complex editing tasks go smoothly.

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Best budget laptop for animation students 2018

The VivoBook S is the best budget laptop for animation students due to solidly matching the minimum requirements. For example, the 8 GB RAM isn’t amazingly high.

But it’s not overly low either. And one can say the same about the 14” screen. What sets it apart from other budget items is the consistent build quality. For example, the 14” screen fits into a frame more commonly seen with 13” displays.

This provides a larger overall view when working on animation. This continues with most features, and all within a price range most students can afford.

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Animation works require a lot of 3D rendering including VFX. These are one of the most demanding application. For such type of power hungry application, GPU is the first specs to consider.

It is better to ignore the integrated GPU and focus on buying a laptop with a dedicated video card. Until last year, before the launch of 8th gen Intel CPU, laptops harboring dedicated GPU has its limitation over its bulky weight and poor battery performance.

Thanks to the advance of technology, with the 8th Gen Intel CPU, now you can find a powerful laptop with NVIDIA GTX 1060 or more in a compact size with long battery life.

This is one of the best leaps that happened in the laptop industry in the last 5 years. I hope my article about the Best 2D and 3D animation laptops for animators and students was helpful. If you like it, don’t forget to share. Good luck with your purchase!

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