July 27, 2006
-
A little something I’m working on…
Er… that’s about it actually. I’m planning/hoping/preying that I can
eventually work this into a roughly 5 minute short. But given the
render time (NINE HOURS to
render five seconds of footage with two models) it won’t be finished
for a long time. Even if the project is completed, it’ll take a couple
of months to render…That’s all. XD
Comments (4)
It took that long? Wow. I have a new found respect for animator’s like you. Gambatte!
Awww… shucks…
But the animation took 9 hours to *render*. It took me 25 minutes to make the animation. If you’ll notice, the scene is made up of some basic box & cylinders.
Wow, pretty neat. Sugoi ne!! Better than anything I can draw with. But why does it have to take nine hours for it to be rendered? Dooby wants to know!!
Well, Dooby, computer animation can easily be split into two parts. The setup & render. Setup consists of setting things up. You’re telling the program what goes where, what moves in which direction, what kind of lighting to use, etc. During the set up phase, the program shows you everything in low-res mode. The models are jagged & pixilated, textures/effects aren’t generally shown, Shading/shadows are kept to a bare minimum, things like that. Once setup is complete, the computer has to render the actual animation.
Render time can vary, depending on the complexity of the animation being rendered; because the computer has to calculate what each and every pixel of the frame will look like. To do this, the CPU needs to calculate all the geometry (a.k.a. polygons), textures, light sources, shadow casters, and where everything is, in relation to everything else.
For example, even though the models used in this animation are fairly simple, I used Global Illumination, which is a CPU intensive lighting system. As a result of using GI, the shadows cast by the various objects in this animation have a soft “realistic” look to it. If I had used a “simpler” system, the animation may have taken an hour, at most, to render; but the shades/shadows cast by everything in the scene would’ve had an unnaturaly sharp edge to them.
Simply put, the more complex the effects, the longer it’ll take to render.
And while we’re at it, here’s a little statistic for you to think about… The special effects for King Kong took around 6 months to render. And they were using around 1800 networked Pentium IV Xenon processor-based CPUs!! So there.