Cost to render a computer-animated movie is $22,000

Since I was looking at Blender recently. I thought it would be interesting to see what the actual cost of making a feature-length computer animated movie would be.

Using the calculator on this render farm's website, I found the cost for rendering a 90-minute movie is $22,000

So computer-generated movies can be sort of expensive to produce. Even though you're not using cameras or dealing with film processing, rendering a movie is fairly expensive. And who knows how many times you may need to render it...

Then you need voice actors and so on, so it's pretty much as expensive as making a non-animated feature film, and probably takes much longer.

Labels: computer animation

It takes 1-5 years to render a computer-animated movie!

I was taking a look at Blender and was curious about CG rendering in general, and what the budget would be for making a computer-animated movie. In particular I was wondering about the rendering expense. I looked at the Wikipedia article on computer-animation and found that it takes 1-5 years to render a movie!!

A large number of workstations (known as a render farm) are networked together to effectively act as a giant computer. The result is a computer-animated movie that can be completed in about one to five years (this process is not comprised solely of rendering, however).

Wow, that's a long time!

Labels: computer animation