38 hours to render one frame in Transformers?

[Hulk]

http://www.amazon.com/gp/produ...=363530701&pf_rd_i=130


If you watch that little trailer on the Amazon page at the end they say it takes 38 hours to render one frame with all the Transformers in it.

38 hours for one frame!

That's unbelievable in today's world of high power processors. I mean I believe it but the complexity of what they are doing must be incredible. I'm sure they're rendering 4k frame size too. But wow!

 

[Lonyo]

http://www.apple.com/pro/profiles/southpark/index2.html

South Park Studios has always had a heavy-duty render farm and powerful workstations. ?When we first started we were using SGI workstations and PowerAnimator,? says Franzen. ?It was one of the few packages that could give us the cardboard style.? Those stations were chained to a 54-processor render farm that could crank out 10 to 15 shots an hour.

And that's just for South Park, which isn't particularly complex compared to Transformers rendering.

 

[EarthwormJim]

General purpose processors are not very fast for rendering cgi, they just do the rendering extremely accurately compared to video cards.

 

[Glavinsolo]

Originally posted by: Hulk
http://www.amazon.com/gp/produ...=363530701&pf_rd_i=130


If you watch that little trailer on the Amazon page at the end they say it takes 38 hours to render one frame with all the Transformers in it.

38 hours for one frame!

That's unbelievable in today's world of high power processors. I mean I believe it but the complexity of what they are doing must be incredible. I'm sure they're rendering 4k frame size too. But wow!

You have to envision what kind of math is going on. You have textures built into each and every item's surface within the frame. Add lighting and now we need to figure out which way the light will bounce off of each pixel with a different texture. Also you have particles etc. and you need to make sure everything flows with the previous and next frame. Also need to make ithe digital image at an astronomical resolution which in turn makes it take so friggin long to render.

 

[bfdd]

Originally posted by: Lonyo
http://www.apple.com/pro/profiles/southpark/index2.html

South Park Studios has always had a heavy-duty render farm and powerful workstations. ?When we first started we were using SGI workstations and PowerAnimator,? says Franzen. ?It was one of the few packages that could give us the cardboard style.? Those stations were chained to a 54-processor render farm that could crank out 10 to 15 shots an hour.

And that's just for South Park, which isn't particularly complex compared to Transformers rendering.

If I remember correctly they used to use the same setup that they made Toy Story with for South Park awhile ago, they've probably upgraded since then.

 

[Foxery]

Something doesn't add up there... if they mean a single video frame, then creating 1 minute worth of screen time, such as the autobots all walking around Sam's back yard or the fight scenes downtown,
24 frames per second * 60 seconds per minute * 38 hours to render each one = several *years* to render each scene.

Are they referring to, say, creating a high res advertising shot? (Can't watch the video at work)

 

[Modelworks]

Originally posted by: Hulk
http://www.amazon.com/gp/produ...=363530701&pf_rd_i=130


If you watch that little trailer on the Amazon page at the end they say it takes 38 hours to render one frame with all the Transformers in it.

38 hours for one frame!

That's unbelievable in today's world of high power processors. I mean I believe it but the complexity of what they are doing must be incredible. I'm sure they're rendering 4k frame size too. But wow!

Someone got their numbers wrong.
I can tell you from personal experience that scenes, way way more complex than transformers, Narnia for example, take nowhere near that amount of time on a modern render farm.
The average time on a modern render farm, 4096 x 3112 resolution , is about 15 minutes per 24/ frame.
That consists of a 96 nodes, each node with 4 processors(3.0ghz), 4GB ram.

A movie with the budget of transformers could have easily doubled that render farm to cut the time in half.

Works out to little over a month with 96 nodes.



If your interested in companies that outsource cpu power for this:
http://www.rendercore.com/rend...98F5759669E8FA79B244AE

Thats who I use when I need something rendered quick.

 

[cubeless]

that's "movie accounting"... they jack up the price of everything so much to not have to pay taxes on all the coin they bring in...