Introduction
I have decided to make a calculations post to put forward the following calculations that help me determine the best way to go about rendering my pieces. I have seen no evidence of a free render farm, and to port it over to Maya would be a challenge that could possibly take longer than just doing it all in blender.
Bunker Scene
In the bunker scene, i was highly motivated to make sure each frame didn’t take up too much time in the rendering, this is because it was the biggest scene and the most important. I needed to set the mood and display what this world is about. I went about optimizing the scene by keeping the texture resolution at 2k as you cant view it up close anyway, turned down global illumination settings for light bounces and i turned down render quality and turned on a de-noiser to make a visually clear image that didn’t take 5 minutes per frame. I used smoke simulations in the scene which hit the performance but i made sure they were optimized by changing the resolution and made sure the bounding box was correct. In this scene i used the compositor in Blender to create the illusion of fog surrounding the bunker to give it a more cinematic look without hurting performance at all. In the end it took around 1 minute and 13 seconds per frame and there is 470 frames total in these scenes. This means the calculation is 470*73/60/60 which gives us around 9.53 Hours or 571.8 Minutes of total rendering time.
Robot Scene
With the robot i could keep all my textures high due to having procedural textures and having them all be my own assets. The robot scene is the biggest scene in volume but the smallest with texture size meaning i could keep the texture resolution without impacting the frames per second that much. the procedural textures were put on all the assets i made that were repeating so i didn’t waste performance. Each frame in this took around 1 minute and 21 seconds according to my stopwatch, and there is 480 frames total. This gives the calculation of 480*81/60/60 which gives us around 10.8 Hours or 648 Minutes.
Wiring Scene
For the transition scenes i needed to make a short, fast and medium detail scene. All the models and textures were mine meaning it was a low performance scene meaning i could do it relatively fast. Each frame took around 47 seconds. With a total of 120 frames the calculations would be 120*47/60/60 which gives 1.86 Hours or 112 Minutes for this scene, without any optimizations.
City Scene
In the city scene, since it makes use of some heavy performance impacts such as fog, multiple textures, multiple models, high poly, and has animations and has changing lights. i decided to take a hit, limit the texture size to 2k textures and made the cell size of the rendering to be 512 in a 4k resolution. I also removed the fog and implemented a volume of emission to simulate fog and it is slightly better with performance. This made each frame take 56 seconds per frame. There is 280 frames in this scene. This means it would be 280*56/60/60 which gives us around 4.35 Hours or 261.3 Minutes in total rendering time.