How long does it take to render a Pixar film?

Question

Does anyone who may be in the business or is a rendering technician know how long a full length Pixar or Dreamworks movie takes to render?

Answer 1

i believe approx. 3 years of rendering

but i could be off

Answer 2

Well, that's a bit of an open question.  From concept to final rendering the estimate is 3 years.  However, that being said, I am certain that each frame has been rendered NUMEROUS times well before the final rendering.  For example, when "Monsters, Inc" was in design phase, they would work on the motion of the elements first and tweaking the timing, frame backdrops and so on....  Only in the final rendering was the "full" hair added in which makes sense as adding in the large # of "fluid" hairs is challenging.   That's also another key to the time question.  What level of details are present in the moving characters and what can be pushed into background renders.  The background renders can be performed in MUCH higher resolution, but don't change that much.  Your forefront characters are likely to change rapidly.

I love watching for the differences and minute details in anime and animation feature films.  It's a fun queue as to the status of rendering software and hardware.  How realistic can they actually make the frame?  If I remember, Titanic was rendered in part on a large DEC alpha cluster and looked quite realistic.  Compare it to "Monsters, Inc" which was designed to "look" like a cartoon, yet with fantastic "hair" detail.

One way to get a reasonable estimate is to acquire recent computer hardware, create or download a PovRay scene file and render a few frames at your movie resolution.  This will give you a rough idea on the time for each single frame.  Since hardware and disk speeds are constantly improving, the speed will continually drop unless you are adding in more and more details.  Now gauge the movie time as a 1.5 hour movie, so 90 minutes or 5400 seconds.  At 30 frames per sec, that would give you roughly 162000 frames for a feature film.

Now if you could render a full single frame every 10 seconds, with Povray, Bryce, or other animation tool..... would give you about 450 hours of render time, perhaps 20 days....

If it took 10 minutes for a full frame (maybe with lots of detail..), that would be 600sec per frame... or 97.2 million seconds to render or roughly 1125 days.... approx 3 years...

The really fun part is that most frames are completely independent, trivially parallel, and thus you can render all the frames in parallel (if you knew what they all were!)...  I suspect that most sequences are developed throughout the 3 year time frame and not all at once...  But IF you did!...  You could rent a cluster with 500 CPU's or more and easily render your full frames in a few days...  Now it becomes a disk space and bandwidth issue.  Thankfully, hard disks and strip/RAID systems are catching up with the capacity to generate the images.

Answer 3

The Finding Nemo movie took 3 years to finish.