Checkup Blues: Update #2 - Workflow & render time

Yo!
The chipping away at my largest project yet continues! As of right now, There's 1 minute and 30 seconds of fully rendered, edited animation with sound.  From where I stand, it looks like the animation will cap at around 3-4 minutes. That's about as close of a progress bar as I can give you right now. The last half of the animation should be quicker to do than the first half, as it requires less setting up and figuring out lighting and other trial-error stuff. 
But isn't this taking an awful lot of time? I sure think it is, so I'm thinking it would be nice to let you in on the process and give you an impression of why this project is such a behemoth despite the short duration of the finished product. 

Project workflow

As I've worked on this short animation, a workflow has formed naturally. The short is basically several small animation clips put together to form a story, each clip being a tiny project in itself. The creation of a clip It is usually divided into four steps:

1. Animating first draft
The most obvious step – I spend some time in DAZ studio animating a first draft of the clip. This can take anywhere from 30 minutes to over 6 hours depending on the complexity and duration of the clip. GIF below (5MB)


2. Test rendering
DAZ studio is not really cut out for animation. Previewing animations within the software itself runs at terrible framerates as seen above(the gif itself runs at 25fps), so it's next to impossible for me to look closer at what needs adjustments. This results in me doing test renders of the animations in order to pick up the little details that need fixing. A test render is a grainy low resolution version of the clip that runs at the intended framerate, allowing me to properly see the flow of my animation. Creating a test render usually takes between 30 minutes and 2 hours depending on the lenght of the clip. During this time, I usually do other related stuff since DAZ studio is busy rendering, such as putting together and editing other clips, or as in this case, writing this post :) GIF below (15MB)


3. Reiterating
Once the test render is finished, I study the resulting clip for minutes on end and take notes of what needs fixing. I then return to DAZ studio and start adjusting the animation. Then I test render again to see if I got it right this time around. And thus begins a loop of adjusting and test rendering that goes on until I'm satisfied with the clip. Needless to say, this step is a wildcard in terms of time consumption. Each time I test render, I try to get other stuff done. Editing finished clips, adding audio, general polishing and double checking other test renders. 

4. Final render 
Once I'm finally satisfied with a test render, I prepare the animation for the definitively most time consuming step – the final render. 
Checkup Blues is rendered in 1920x818 resolution, running at 24 frames per second. The top image of this post is an example of a finished frame. A single frame of this size with the minimum desired quality takes between 20-30 minutes to complete. That's 24fps x 20min = 480min = minimum 8 hours of render time for a single second of finished animation! 
Once my computer is put to render a full quality frame, it dramatically slows down for other tasks as this requires all of it's resources. Due to this, I only have it render full quality frames whenever I'm out, at work or sleeping. This usually means an average of about 16 hours of render time per day, if a clip is ready for final rendering.
 My shortest clip is about 2 seconds, and my longest so far caps at around 10. So you know, my rig is really working it these days. If my computer dies, it dies a hero. Still image below


In short,
I'd say that a 5 second clip of average complexity would take about 3-5 hours to animate, another 3-5 hours of test rendering and adjusting, and then 40-60 hours to render at full quality. And seeing that this is not a fulltime occupation, it's not every day that I sit down with the project either. I barely even spend two hours on this on a regular weekday. The bigger animating sessions take place when I'm free and know I won't be doing anything special that day. That way I can get completely into the zone and make some real progress.
And that's the gist of it. I hope me opening up a little has given you an understanding of how huge this project feels to me. I really want to see it through though, and now I have everything planned out in my head so I know how to proceed with the rest of the animation. I've also gotten better at it while working with this, so it's already bearing fruits!
Until next time! Stay healthy everyone!