TIL It took 29 Hours to render a single frame from the latest monsters Inc movie
Yup you read it correctly, The 2013 Film Monsters University took up to 29 hours for a single frame.
Let me break that down. In a single second of a film, you are required to have from 24 frames up to 60 frames for just ONE SECOND.
If the team at Pixar used a single CPU, they woulve have needed 100 million hours to render the film in its final form, and it would have taken 10,000 years to finish.
Luckily Pixar have a monster render farm(excuse the pun). What is a render farm you ask ? - Well imagine a massive space filled with hundreds of the fastest computers money can buy. Well Pixar has a huge one, housing 2,000 computers - each having 12 cores, making a massive 24,000 cores working on a single film.
But why does it take so long to render a single frame?
Well you need to take into consideration what goes into a scene. Nearly everything in the film is created in a 3D program that works like real life. For instance for Monsters University the guys at Pixar developed a lighting technique called global illumination. Which in term works pretty much like the suns light, light is created and it bounces around the scene light it would in real life, but it doesn't just bounce once it bounces multiple times creating a very realistic look to the scene.
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Take for instance this screen shot, the shadows get created from all the lighting by the program, but because of the global illumination your shadows look clean and realistic because of the bounce lights.
As beautiful as this technique is, it is very resource intensive.
Now imagine how something like hair or grass must use resources to render
In this monsters inc Sully on his own had 5.5 million strands of hair, now imagine a program that is not only going to render these strands, with their shadows, hi lights, but the program also needs to figure out or simulate the movement of each hair according to sullys movements, hair and other hairs interacting.
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These are all massive things a computer needs to calculate.
Hopefully next time anyone watches an animated film, they will realise how long these films take to make. Monsters Inc took 4 years to create but on average these films take around 6 years.
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Wow this is fascinating I never would have thought it took this long per frame.
I work in the visual fx industry so i've experienced long duration s for frames, but nothing like this hahaha
Oh wow, thats super cool! Have you worked on any projects that I may be familiar with?
Increasing My General Knowledge on Steemit, Thank You.