I want to learn animation, but I have a question about rendering

#1

I’ve been wanting to learn 3D animation for over a decade, but never took the plunge. I’ve thought about using Blender with free tutorials, then thought about Animation Mentot that I see advertised all the time, but it was pricey.

One thing that has always stopped me from going through with learning the process is that I hear rendering 3D animations take forever. That something like a thirty second animated video could take a month to render. But then video games render there graphics on the fly, from what I understand.

What’s the truth about this? I understand it’s going to vary greatly from Pixar level animation to a more basic student video, but is there some sort of ballpark understanding of how it works that you guys can tell me.

I really want to learn it, I have such a passion to create things, but I’m definitely not patient!

Thank you in advance!

#2

Rendering can indeed take forever, especially when doing photo realistic images at film or print resolution. However, blender does now have a GPU based renderer called “Eevee” that looks as nice as nearly any game out there and works in (almost) real time. It may not be able to do everything that blender’s “Cycles” renderer can do, but the benefit of time saved might be a trade off you are willing to make.
You can see it in action here:

#3

blender 2.81 has a feature called denoise in the compositor that decreases render time by removing noise from lower resolution and gives it a higher quality render. Checkout the beta. its used for cycles…

#4

CPU based rendering can indeed be pretty time consuming on a single machine.

But remember studios like Pixar use Renderfarms. Hundreds of machines working together to render sequences
usually get stuff done in a few hours.

I agree with the other posts here-but just so you have a perspective on how its being done in large studios as well.