You are rendering a production shot, furry Character, motion blur, lots of textures…and in Full HD. This rendertime is to be expected, especially since your CPU (i7 950) is already about 5 years old.
Also, don’t worry about the memory usage, more memory usage does not mean faster rendertime, it’s rather the opposite.
The only thing you can do, is to simplify the scene (remove assets, reduce subsurf level, less hair particles…)
While the Caminades guys didn’t push things to Hollywood extremes in all honesty a movie like Caminades isn’t meant to be rendered on a single computer. I got the USB but never attempted to render a frame but I doubt my render times will be any better.
So if I have to make such short movies what kind of set-up does I require? Can you please give me an approx system configuration list for one or two computers?
Quite frankly the setup I bought that time was meant for making animation movies but I understand more CPU is required than RAM.
So does Blender handles network rendering? How exactly do I connect 2-3 computers to render fast with blender?
I think the easiest Way to render something over network is to load the Blenderfile on all your machines and then set your Qutput Directory to the same networkdrive for all the Computers and check Placeholders.
Instead of buying mutliple machines just for rendering, its probably cheaper if you use a renderfarm(assuming you are not rendering animations through the whole year). You could also ask friends to help you once your animation is finished, to get it done faster.
If you want to use CPU and GPU at the same time, you could start 2 instances of Blender with the same method as described above but on a single machine. But keep in mind that bigger Scenes may consume too much ram for your graphics card. You can take a look at the CPU/GPU benchmark threads and then try to render these scenes on your machine, to get an idea if its worth to upgrade a few parts of your machine.
More RAM is useful for rendering, but not all of it is used all of the time and it does not necessarily produce a major speedup. A less than optimal amount of RAM can cause a slowdown however.
Think of it like these energy drinks that claim they have “Vitamin B12 for energy!” This claim is actually nonsense. B12 does not produce energy in the human body. Only sugar does that (and fat and carbs and whatnot that get converted to sugar). A deficiency in vitamin B12 however can cause you to feel tired. Energy drink commercials simply make the contrapositive claim: since too little B12 can cause a lack of energy, more B12 must make more energy! They can get away with this because of poor regulation of health claims, but that’s off topic.
The point is that RAM in rendering is similar to this claim. The more the merrier, but it’s not actually going to make your renders go any faster than your computer can calculate. Too little RAM on the other hand will definitely slow you down.
Totally depends on your project. During the production of Tears of Steel we couldn’t use some machines in the Blender Institute for rendering because they only had 8 GB of RAM and wouldn’t render certain shots with lots of geometry, textures and footage.
Ok then I will buy such motherboards which can have upgrades for RAM but Max 16 GB will be enough right?
My current sytem has upgrade max limit of 24 GB and with the new 8 GB RAM sticks I could probably upgrade to 48 GB, but will that be necessary for the main machine? or I can just do with 24 GB?
My problem is while I am rendering with Blender ( whether CPU or GPU) and also with Vue ( which has only CPU support) temps of both my GPU and CPU are going over 85-90 degrees.
Now in this condition I am unable to do any other work while rendering is going on. It will put extra load on both the components making them unstable in long run. I am basically tied down, because while rendering is going on I cannot do anything and high quality renderings take hours for both the software.
So another machine is required just to continue rendering while I keep working on my current machine.
The point is should I buy another machine and setup the render farm with that or build a render farm as shown in the link above and connect with my current setup?
I will not be buying complete 6 machines for the farm, I will start with one or two and then proceed to get more depending upon how much high end and lengthy rendering is required. But the link above gave me a great idea to save enough space in my room which is small anyways.