question on animation and pixar

shamguy4 · Post by **shamguy4** » Tue May 25, 2010 3:52 pm

Ok so I have used blender for fun a few times...made a few things...havent used it in a while...
I wanted to get into animation but I was reading a magazine and it said it takes Pixar 7 hours to make 1 frame!?

is this a lie?

it doesnt seem to take long in blender? once you give a character bones and a structure (forgot what its called...) you can make him walk pretty easily....

Post by **stiv** » Tue May 25, 2010 4:16 pm

it said it takes Pixar 7 hours to make 1 frame!?

I suspect that 'make' means render in this case.

Lots of objects, film resolution (4k~8k), lots of lights (some scenes in Finding Nemo had hundreds, iirc), multiple rendering passes for compositing...yeah, I can believe 7 hours/frame. But don't forget they have huge render farms churning away at the task of making frames.

SteveBaker · Post by **SteveBaker** » Fri Jun 04, 2010 6:46 am

Seven hours on one computer is very believable. Remember that if they are rendering the final movie, they'll be using very high resolution - perhaps as much as 4000x3000 pixels - also, they'll probably be using all of the most expensive rendering modes and rendering a lot of expensive stuff like fur/hair and individual blades of grass.

They have many hundreds - perhaps thousands of computers - but even so, it would take a long time to render the entire movie. A two hour movie at movie frame rates (24fps) is 172,800 frames. That's about 1.2 million CPU/hours - and even with 1000 computers, you're looking at about 6 weeks of elapsed time.

On a 3D movie, it's even worse because they have to render everything twice!

Juan C. · Post by **Juan C.** » Wed Jun 09, 2010 11:21 am

That sounds a bit scary!

but I guess, the more time you spend in your project the better it gets! .... lot of dedication will be require!

shamguy4 · Post by **shamguy4** » Thu Jun 17, 2010 6:59 pm

right so continuing a conversation from long ago... lol

How can someone make a short little film?
how long will it take to render?
what if I wanted to just make a 10 to 30 minute movie on my computer?

Will it take me 70 years until its complete?

Dooble Studios · Post by **Dooble Studios** » Wed Jun 23, 2010 5:36 pm

shamguy4 wrote:
Will it take me 70 years until its complete?

Ha ha only if you were making it the quality of Pixar...

Post by **stiv** » Thu Jun 24, 2010 3:23 am

Will it take me 70 years until its complete?

Quite possibly. Rendering is a business problem - throw some money at it and it goes away. Your first problem is actually making the animation to be rendered.