How much time to render 5 minutes?

[rubixstarr]

I was wondering, on average, how long it is taking for people to render 5 minutes of animation? i understand that it depends on your computer speed and how much complications you are rendering on your animation but... just curious. any answer will be much appreciated.

[skippy]

...yeah, and factor in the frame size, too...maybe you can do a few tests based on the most computationally-intensive frame/camera-angle.

I did 22 minutes of animation year before last on a dual 450 with a renderer about 1/2 as fast as Lightwaves, frame size 400x300 px.
there was heavy glass, metal reflective surfaces, handful of lights, textures, etc..

Each 15-second clip took me 24 hours. maybe half that for LW...so, could be 48 hours/minute at that rate.

just a rough calc based on *my* experience.

s

[jpburns]

This is like: "How big is a house?"

It depends. Factor in things like complexity, frame size, movement, bells & whistles, and you might get a guess...

[lasco]

Well hem…
yes this question does'nt really make sense.
It's not only that it "depends" on many things that counts but
in WHAT WAY and what amount it does…

Let's try to give you some tracks to make your own opinion :
First you should keep in mind that the base is this one :
rendering time of an animation = (rendering time of a still) x (number of images)

EXCEPT of course if you have specific settings like items in cache (shadow map, radiosity etc.)…

Now if you may find what is the minimum rendering time of
a 3d scene (or nearly) for a given frame size and AA level
(just make the test with a cube for example :) you must know that
there is no maximum time, it's infinite depending on your scene.

Also what you should mind is that there are items that allows you
to see in advance nearly how much time your rendering will take
(antialiasing, size of image, number of polys) as the growing of time
is "regular", and things that are very hard to anticipate.

Example : render a pic with an antialisating Low (5 passes).
You can be sure that the same pic with an AA Medium (9 passes)
will take : ((time first rendering) / 5) x 9
But if you start to play with radiosity it's a hell to guess from
a rendering of a given level of radios. how much it will take with
a higher level because you think not in multiple of 2 or 3 but
in mutliples of 10, 20, 50 or more !!!!

Knowing that and the fact that the position of the camera
has also great influence on the rendering time you realize that
anticipating the rendering of an animation requires many tests
and depends not partially but ENTIRELY on your scene.

Last example to show you how it's difficult for our natural "logic"
to accept the programm's logic :
for the same image size and level of AA rendering a frame
with 2 000 000 polys but with only opaque surfaces
might be much shorter than rendering a scene with only 1000 polys
that are all half-transparent and double-sided…

I do believe that rather than trying to know - even relatively - how long
takes a 5 minute or 10 minutes to render it's more usefull to
understand well in what amount your different settings will influe
on your rendering time. After this you'll be able to know how you must set
your scene when you need to divide your rendering time by 2 or by 30 !!

[lasco]

…well I understand your request was more to have examples.
I think that for most people here 5 minutes is very very long movie
and that whatever domain is concern quite few people can afford such
a long animation - I said few, not that it does'nt exist.

In my domain for example (architectural / urban visualisation)
a 5 minutes 3D film can easily take months to render… even with a 10 computers
render farm !

[rubixstarr]

thanks for your comments. I understand that this question is very vague, but i was just looking for some examples that some people might have time to post for me to get an overall idea of how much render time people are spending on their animation these days....thanks again.

[toby]

most short films by solo independent artists are shorter than 5 minutes - 3 minutes is long. It can take weeks or months for every minute of animation to figure out a story and storyboard it, design and build all the sets, props and characters, texture them, light them, animate them, then you still have to edit the rendered frames into a movie - not to mention audio. Render time is not the biggest problem.

My final animation for school was 2 minutes long and took me 3 solid months to make. I think the frames took about 3 min. each and took 3-4 days to render on a dual 450.