Charge Render Times Overview

“How long did it take to render?” This question always comes up after the release of an open movie. Unfortunately, there is no straightforward answer. Are we talking about the total time it took to render the film once? Every shot iteration? The average render time? Usually the answer to these follow-up questions is “yes”.

Here is a visualisation that gives some insight into the per-frame final render times of the short.

You can download the high-res video and the source data from the content gallery.

The visualisation is based on the final frame count of the film, which is around 3200 (not counting opening title and credits). The median render time is around 3 minutes. Within this set of frames, the time varies greatly even within the same shot, depending on the hardware used for the rendering, and other factors such as shader compilation time, scene complexity and amount of motion blur samples.

The rendering of the film was performed fully in-house, using the Flamenco render manager and the hardware available at Blender HQ, on NVIDIA cards (RTX 3XXX, Quadro, etc).

This is quite an achievement, considering that the final frames were render at 4K resolution within a few weeks of time.

More info on how we collect, process and estimate render times in an upcoming article. If you have any question leave a comment!