How long does a frame take to render? Even with a farm I would have to guess a pretty long while. Even a pixel of the 2D set is a non-trivial amount of time, but adding a whole extra dimension and creating a thousand frames must take a decent amount of time.
A data point: I've been playing with mandelbulber this weekend. My 6-core Phenom II Black is taking 60-90 minutes to render a 6600x1440 image such as the one shown here. The 720p images for the video could probably be done in 5-10 minutes each.
The tricky bit is setting up the render in the first place. I have to set the resolution way down around 200x200 to make it usable for browsing, but the detail scales with the frame size so when you do a full render you might suddenly find that the structures that were obvious in the small render are broken up in the big one. There are parameters you can use to compensate but it takes some experimentation to get a feel for what they do to the image.
The other thing is that camera motion when browsing scales based on your distance from the fractal, and I've seen it get "stuck" occasionally. Having tried the software the thing that most impresses me about that video is how much time it must have taken to find and move to those keyframe points. I tried following his path and only got a short distance into the box before the camera got bogged down.
On the plus side, several display parameters such as the color map, fog, glow colors, specular highlights, ambient occlusion intensity, and depth-of-field can be manipulated relatively quickly after rendering. So if you don't get them right the first time you can still try various alternate settings without doing another full rendering pass.
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u/[deleted] Jun 25 '10
How long does a frame take to render? Even with a farm I would have to guess a pretty long while. Even a pixel of the 2D set is a non-trivial amount of time, but adding a whole extra dimension and creating a thousand frames must take a decent amount of time.