Progress Report - October 21, 2024

Hello, everyone!

I've decided to make this post public to all, because we've hit the biggest milestone!

The final 4K render has begun!

I think I've got the animation just about as good as I am going to get it, without burning untold weeks more than I already have. I'm not 100% happy with it, but "perfect" is the enemy of "good enough", and I think the project is very far along the "good enough" spectrum at this point.

I've done some napkin math based off a single 5-second render at 720p 16-samples, which took 223 seconds to render. 2160p triples the time, and then 128-sample (my standard quality setting) triples it again, for a total 9x multiplier. That means that same 5-second segment will take roughly 33.5 minutes for the final 4K render.

Taking that render time and extending it out to the total 15-minute project, and we're looking at, uhh... A 100-hour render. That's just over 4 days. And that's just napkin math.

That is of course assuming all shots render exactly equally, which won't be the case. Number of lights is the biggest impacter there, and number of characters is a heavy variable too (though that doesn't change too much). But 100 hours is a good baseline for us to expect.

And, of course, that also isn't taking into account the fact I will be offloading large chunks off this to my rendering computer (assuming it can load the scene, I haven't tested that yet), which renders at about 60% the speed of my main machine. I'll have both computers running during the nights as I sleep, and then only the render machine running in the background during the days as I work on things, most importantly putting together the toolchain necessary for generating the dynamic livestream VFX.

So, yeah. For the sake of sanity, let's just assume this entire week will be spent rendering. That's not taking into account any of the post editing work. So, we're probably not going to see a release this week.

But come next Monday, we should be basically sitting on the finish line!

As always, I'll keep you all updated. Until next week, everyone!