Technical talk

That’s not average at all! It’s way overblown. I recommend you to use any rig you have, it doesn’t matter, Blender runs in a potato if needed. There are very very few things that you can’t do with a weak computer, but most of things you can do, just slower. You also tend to naturally cater your art asset’s quality around your computer’s power level. And you also learn to optimize and compromise. Trust me, the rig is never the barrier of entry, you wouldn’t believe how weak and old my computer was when I made the first Peridot and Undyne renders, and how weak it was even before that.

I meet a lot of people that use their computer’s power as an excuse to never get into 3D. Never do that!. Otherwise I’ll prove you with numbers that your current computer is actually stronger than mine was.

For the Muffet render with her pet, 150 hours was a completetly outlandish number. Again, overblown and not an average at all! I just wanted to push the envelope for a change, after being so used to constraints.

The time was due to all the things that I’ve packed in the render, namely the micro geometry and the subsurface scattering material of the Muffin monster, as well as the resolution. At first I was going to use a resolution of 0.5 pixels per triangle, that required 13GB!! of ram, but the renderfarms I used gave me errors and wouldn’t render, so I reduced the microgeometry resolution to 1 pixel per triangle. 8gb of ram at the end. (I used  Foxrenderfarm btw, using 40$ worth of free coupons) 

This was also at a time when I only had CPU so I couldn’t do GPU render (although I wouldn’t have been able to use GPU render regardless due to the memory requirements of the microgeometry) My most recent renders at 2K resolution take about 10, 30, 50 minutes on my gtx1060, although they’re not as complex, they’re mostly characters floating in space, that’s more of the average.

The most accurate way to calculate the final render time is to do smaller test renders, like with 1/10 the final resolution and 1/10 the final sample count, substract the build time, and then multiply the seconds by 1000. This is way more accurate than trusting the “remaining time” info at the top. That’s how I was able to calculate the final time of 150 hours without actually doing it, and how I decided to use an online renderfarm service. I also used the calculators of several online renderfarms and the numbers agreed more or less. I had to make tests at full resolution too, since the adaptative microgeometry of the Muffin depends on the pixels, to see how much the build time and memory consumption were affected. In the end, in Foxrenderfarm, the final render took 9 hours