Wow, I didn't realize that it took that long to render a single frame. Considering how many frames there are per second and how many seconds there are in the movie, it would take an enormous amount of compute time to render the movie. I wonder how much effort it would take if someone at Pixar wanted to change some small details in one of the models.
rbunny
wait so how long did it take to make this movie????????!!!!!
EDIT: 6 years.
small_potato__
@potato @rbunny you might find this video interesting
Arthas007
Coco is a masterpiece, no dissent
keenan
The good news is you can make it faster by using more than one machine to render. :-)
pw123
I always love when Coco is mentioned in terms of ray tracing, the amount of light sources they have in a single shot is mind boggling
Arthas007
@keenan magic power of parallelism!
marshmallow
I'd never really thought about the computation needed to render animated films before, so this was really mindblowing to hear! Especially for Coco, which has countless light sources all throughout!
Sybil
I knew a little about 2D animation and its process but I never imagined 3D animation rendering would take this long, 50 hours/frame compared to (a rough estimate of) 1 hour/frame. I can't imagine how much effort the animators put in...
evannw
So interesting to learn that rendering a single frame is this intensive. How are video games able to use ray tracing?
tarangs
I think video games might have much lesser complexity in terms of the individual models and the scene, also the game is rendered at a relatively lower resolution(usually, pre 3090 and 4k gaming :P ). There may be more constraints in gaming as well(considering the game has to allow for players to move around and render the scene from different view points). I personally have never felt any video game character to match the quality of the Pixar movie characters...
And since Pixar is telling a story with no interactivity, their models have to be really high quality for it to feel like a movie. Also since they "direct" the movie and plan their shots and camera angles, most frames only have to be rendered once and at really high resolution. So maybe they can afford to turn up all the visually appealing aspects of rendering since the final product is essentially a video file.
One more interesting aspect is that in games, we measure "Frames per second" whereas for this case, we are measuring "hours/days per frame" :D
dtorresr
I wonder how many times they have to render frames before they feel it's "just right". I feel that they would have to simplify the scene by maybe reducing the number of rays/bounces so they can reduce the amount of time it takes to render one frame. Even then it would probably still take a considerable amount of time as you wouldn't want the frame to look too bland.
triangle
I'm now wondering what the timeline of making an animated movie looks like and how much of it is dedicated to just rendering the scenes.
keenan
@All: Great discussion. Getting quick and "good enough" previews of high-quality rendering is a big business for people who are really making movies. Some good research on this, like Jonathan Ragan-Kelly et al's Lightspeed interactive preview system, which I believe has been used in production at a number of places (and/or inspired subsequent systems).
Wow, I didn't realize that it took that long to render a single frame. Considering how many frames there are per second and how many seconds there are in the movie, it would take an enormous amount of compute time to render the movie. I wonder how much effort it would take if someone at Pixar wanted to change some small details in one of the models.
wait so how long did it take to make this movie????????!!!!!
EDIT: 6 years.
@potato @rbunny you might find this video interesting
Coco is a masterpiece, no dissent
The good news is you can make it faster by using more than one machine to render. :-)
I always love when Coco is mentioned in terms of ray tracing, the amount of light sources they have in a single shot is mind boggling
@keenan magic power of parallelism!
I'd never really thought about the computation needed to render animated films before, so this was really mindblowing to hear! Especially for Coco, which has countless light sources all throughout!
I knew a little about 2D animation and its process but I never imagined 3D animation rendering would take this long, 50 hours/frame compared to (a rough estimate of) 1 hour/frame. I can't imagine how much effort the animators put in...
So interesting to learn that rendering a single frame is this intensive. How are video games able to use ray tracing?
I think video games might have much lesser complexity in terms of the individual models and the scene, also the game is rendered at a relatively lower resolution(usually, pre 3090 and 4k gaming :P ). There may be more constraints in gaming as well(considering the game has to allow for players to move around and render the scene from different view points). I personally have never felt any video game character to match the quality of the Pixar movie characters...
And since Pixar is telling a story with no interactivity, their models have to be really high quality for it to feel like a movie. Also since they "direct" the movie and plan their shots and camera angles, most frames only have to be rendered once and at really high resolution. So maybe they can afford to turn up all the visually appealing aspects of rendering since the final product is essentially a video file.
One more interesting aspect is that in games, we measure "Frames per second" whereas for this case, we are measuring "hours/days per frame" :D
I wonder how many times they have to render frames before they feel it's "just right". I feel that they would have to simplify the scene by maybe reducing the number of rays/bounces so they can reduce the amount of time it takes to render one frame. Even then it would probably still take a considerable amount of time as you wouldn't want the frame to look too bland.
I'm now wondering what the timeline of making an animated movie looks like and how much of it is dedicated to just rendering the scenes.
@All: Great discussion. Getting quick and "good enough" previews of high-quality rendering is a big business for people who are really making movies. Some good research on this, like Jonathan Ragan-Kelly et al's Lightspeed interactive preview system, which I believe has been used in production at a number of places (and/or inspired subsequent systems).