Just found out that Weta is calling on the guy behind the Disney film Tangled to help them with their Rise of the Apes and Tintin films. This tells me that Tintin is not even in the rendering stage yet, and I was wondering just how long it would take them to produce the film. Obviously, they have massive render farms, but even so, the demands on CGI animation these days can be huge. I understand that it took 1 day for 1 frame to be rendered in some sequences for the Star Trek film. The Tintin film appears to have hair, fabric, liquids, as well as desert scenes and complex street scenes. I can’t imagine that being fast to realise.

So I was wondering - just how long can it take to render out a CGI film these days?

It apparently takes about 3 years of rendering to get a finished film.

Mark

Of course, it's not a straight forward answer, because there's character rendering and motion tests that take place during the actual stages of production, but yeah, apparently about three years.

Mark

So what you are saying is that there may already be a “base render” to which effects such as hair, fabric, etc. can be added closer to the time?

Good answer from Yahoo Answers...
http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index ... 309AAXln70

It’s an interesting process. WETA seem to specialise on huge vistas and very complex objects. The battle scenes in Lord of the Rings, the hair on King Kong for example, are highly complex affairs. It will be interesting to see how involved the city scenes in the Tintin film are, and how much of Brussels is recognisable.

The principal photography for Tintin took 40 days. That's no time at all. And yet the completed film will take 3 years.
Digital - making film production quick and easy, right?

Essentially, yes.
Oli's link covers a lot of what I was going to say, so he's saved me a lot of time there. (8+)

Mark

3 years is a long time.

I once tried to render a huge-ass scene in 3ds max and it took six hours! Then my laptop had to audacity to crash when trying to view the file as it was so huge! Complete fail.

Bryce 4 made it very easy to have renders of 10 hours on relatively simple scenes. Just had to leave it overnight and hope that the final result was worth it.

Since I get to play with rendering at work I can safely say "Rendering" is an art form in its own right. It's simply not a case of having a model, some textures and some lights then pressing "GO" and waiting - the sheer number of factors that come into composing a convincingly lit scene often mean there'll be multiple passes to incorporate tweaks and edits along the way. Sure, a great deal can be guessed at, and a significant amount of time saved by doing low-res test renders, but to reach the level of polish "required" in today's CGI-saturated cinema market will still require scores of artistic direction - it's not like the render farm is simply churning away 3 years flat whilst everyone takes a break.

I didn't think it was a 3 year wait. I know there will be tests, technological advances during the development process, etc. I was wondering how long the final render would take. It seems obvious from responses here, and the Yahoo link, that rendering is a multi-faceted approach.