The Void Animation Project: Rendering Our Animation

So we might not have gotten all of our animation fully completed, but we both agreed that instead of waiting to render until we were both done with animation to begin the process, we would instead render as we went. So what that basically meant was when we had animated a scene, we would save it, add cameras and batch render, then we would drag all our files onto another computer, and begin animating the next scene, while the previous clip renders. We felt that this would be the best technique to effectively manage our time and so far it is working rather successfully.

On the first day of rendering, we had forty seconds worth of animation to render. It was the 2nd of December, so with a week until deadline I felt that we were giving ourselves a comfortable window of time. I stayed in college from 9.30 - 9 at night and in that time we were able to render twenty seconds of animation on four computers. So, even though the process did seem massively time consuming, it did give us a good idea of just how long rendering our animation would take. There was no way to predict how long it would take because everyone's animation is different. Some people have a lot of scenery in their animations so obviously it will take longer for them to render their animations. Ours, I believe was somewhere in the middle. Technically our scenery is just a load of random objects so I felt they could be quicker to render in that respect, although some of these objects are massive, for example the TV. Furthermore, once we had added lighting of course that would so down the process too.

Looking back I still don't think I completely understand our render times, but I do understand that close ups of characters like the below would take around two minutes to render.

And establishing shots like below take a while as they have to render all the scenery.

In conclusion i am very glad we started rendering when we did and not at the last minute since it is an incredibly time consuming process.