Render Time

For each of the following 4 tests, I ran it at least twice to ensure that my timings are correct.

The above image is 384x288 in resolution and took about 4.0 minutes to render (without ray-tracing enabled) on an AMD Duron 950MHz CPU.

The above image is 384x288 in resolution and took about 4.17 minutes to render (with default ray-tracing enabled) on an AMD Duron 950MHz CPU.

The above image is 384x288 in resolution and took about 1.25 minutes to render (without ray-tracing enabled) on an AMD Duron 950MHz CPU.

The above image is 384x288 in resolution and also took about 1.33 minutes to render (with default raytracing enabled) on an AMD Duron 950MHz CPU.

We expect the render times to go up as our factory is more complex than the house, and as our scene setup will be more complex than shown in the second image, which was rendered for an animatic. We will probably have grass and clouds, both of which will up the render time. It seems that rendering grass and clouds will not be as expensive as an explosion. Finally, default ray-tracing seems to only slightly up the render time. So, we will for now allocate about 4 minutes per frame of ray-trace enabled rendering, on average.

Our production will be 35 seconds in length, and 30 frames per second, for a total of 1050 frames.

About 12 seconds will involve explosions. And 23 seconds will not.

Again, the factory is bigger and more complex and we will need to separately hardware-render a layer of particles from the explosion. Those will then be merged with the original layer.

Also, some of our machines at home are a little faster, some a little slower, so the render time estimate will be rough. Without considering the time that it takes to merge the hardware and software rendered layers, we will for now estimate about 1050 frames x 4 minutes per frame on average = 4200 minutes of render time for our production. That's 70 hours in total, and if split among the members, about 14 hours of rendering simultaneously.

Note that even a small increase in the resolution will noticeably prolong the render time. Also, we must allocate time for computer freezes and crashes as they seem to happen often. So, we will stick with the small (384x288 or there-about) resolution unless we are sure we can finish rendering a larger one before the final due date.

[Note 1]: By default raytracing options I mean (in Maya): reflections (1), refractions (6), shadows (2), bias (0.000).

[Note 2]: We will be able to update this page with a more precise estimate once the details of the scene (grass, clouds, other effects) are put in place.