Rendering an animation is a time consuming process. It is also a computing resource consuming process. When I started rendering the frames for this project I found that just opening a browser page could be slow. And these renders aren’t fast.
I found that the time it takes a single frame to render is between 17 and 19 minutes. I am rendering at 800 x 600 and sampling each pixel twice. I am rendering only the single full pass, nothing extra like an ambient occlusion pass or subsurface scattering or what not.
I had originally estimated that each frame might take 20 minutes to render. For 300 frames at 20 minutes that was 6000 minutes. Doing the rest of the math, my original estimate was that it would take 4 days and 4 hours to render. Fortunately, each frame is not taking 20 minutes to render and it looks like the render time will be a little less than 4 days.
One of the things that I have noticed is that when I am rendering from 3ds it seems that my graphics card is pulling a little more power than it usually does. I saw an interesting spike in my power bill last month when I started creating prettier renders of my daily work. With this in mind and the amount of time it just this short scene is going to take to render, I decided I should look into render farms.
I found a couple that look like they might fit within my current budget. There are surprising number of render farms out there. This is good because I have a couple of other projects in mind that will likely be more than 300 frames. When I get to those I’ll have to do more research on that and I’ll let you know what I end up with.