Hello everybody, I just finished the animation of my Lower Manhattan 3D model. Hope you all like it 
Please don´t mind the background image glitch in the end.
So why did it take you 40 days to render the part of the city? It doesn’t look like there was a lot of detail.
" Not a lot of detail" Wow! Looks like a thousand buildings to me. It looks like every building is there. Its amazing and must have taken a long time to model. I worked on one city block for weeks.
actually cycles just took that long, although i did not render in the night. just the days. 720p and 400 samples. one frame was around 12 minutes and there were 2850 frames, that is 570 hours. Now i am giving my computer some proper bedrest
and yes it took a long time to model, i think full-time it would have been around seven months.
Very impressive work, Roger! Your dedication to rendering for such a long time is admirable. I’m sure you computer is glad to be done with that!
Can you explain your process for modeling the city? Did you use Google Maps to aid you? It looks like you’ve modeled quite a fair amount of unique structures!
thanks James, i indeed used google maps, but also bing maps and skyscraperpage.com to get the building heights.
well first i kind of model the blueprint using mostly the CAD addon, without this addon, this model would have not been possible. then i extrude it out to the right height and perhaps add more detail to it, however with so many different buildings different techniques were used.
You really need a render farm.
I agree XeroShadow, i do need it. probably this year i will get myself some extra computer power, i will need it for future city i want to model and then animate.
Then, you will need to take a look at this link. http://cgcookie.com/blender/2013/08/09/setting-up-a-render-farm/
To add a shameless plug, there are online solutions that can deliver a lot faster than any home built farm. If you get time pressed at some point, it may be worth taking a look.
Shameless? It is not shameless if you can offer an easier way to speed up the animations.
We do indeed have an easier, and faster way. However, it’s a paid solution, not a free one. Hence the ‘disclaimer’ at the beginning of my post
online renderfarms does sounds interesting however i think for future animations i will choose to buy extra computer power since i am planning more then one animations in the future so a personal renderfarm might be a good solution. however i have this question, i noticed that cycles does not make use so well of multicores when going over 5 cores, does anybody else experienced this?