How long to render full animated movie in 2024
I was wondering for a 2024 version of the question. I tried to google it but couldn’t find a good recent answer, only old ones from 2014 movies. I know there have been lots of progress in hardware and software, like needing less samples per pixel while using denoising or using gpus.
In: Technology
How longs a piece of string?
It always takes about 2 two to 3 years.
If it took longer then they can make a movie that looks better while rendering for basically the same amount of time due to both hardware and software improvements. So the 2 to 3 year time is targeted for big animated movies.
Rendering times scales with object quality/count/complexity, effects count, material complexity, lighting complexity, and all sorts of other things, all of which are artistic choices (usually 6-8 hours per frame based on a 2019 estimate, longer if more complex). Conversely, you can shorten render times by splitting it up into parts and rendering each part on a different machine – something you absolutely have to do if you want millions of frames done in a reasonable timeframe. The question then becomes: how big of a multi-core supercomputer do you want to pay for?
For a 2 hour movie, at 8 hours per frame and 24 frames per second, that’s 8h/frame * 2h * 3600s/h * 24fps = 1,382,400 computer-hours of calculation, or about 157 years of raw computing time, before factoring in edits, re-renders, and other production hiccups. Most studios have supercomputers big enough to bring that down to a roughly 2 year process.
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