The joys of week long renders
Since moving to HD production, the rendering times for the animations you see for WoodMarvels.com products has gone up dramatically. What use to take maybe a day or two, now take upwards of a week to simply render. This doesn’t include any modeling or sound/music/post-production… just rendering a 3D animation scene.
I had an animation scene (9 seconds worth) finish just a few hours ago, it took 5 days (24 hours a day, for 5 days straight) to render and then, when working in post after the sound and everything else needed to complete the animation was done, I saw a frame jump. Try to imagine somebody running and instead of a smooth motion, you see somebody walking then right away, they are running. It makes no sense and usually caused by a few frames that didn’t render right. In this case, it was worse.
My computer crashed 3 days into the 5 day run and I just rebooted and continued rendering from where it left-off… but for some reason, the file changed. What’s worse, the original file was altered somehow during this process so I had basically two sets of ‘animations’ without one matching the other. Solution? Re-render the whole thing again. Not fun… just lost a week of rendering time. As a result, I hope to launch this product update by the end of the week as well as a new one around the same time (rendering permitting). I’ve done a few tweeks in the hopes that it can lead to a quicker rendering time on the second try.
Just to give you an idea, the last frame you see in the Zulu Main Battle Tank animation (720p HD version) surrounded by “gold/bronze” took about 5 hours to render with all setting maxed-out. This is just a static shot so it’s fine, only one frame extended over several seconds but I have to bring the settings down when it comes to animations otherwise the title of this blog post would be “The joys of month long renders”.
Zulu Main Battle Tank: 3D Assembly Animation (720HD)
Ah… the joys of week long renders. I will need an industrial workstation or rendering farm before long.