i was just wondering, what kind of computers do the animators at pixar and other companys use to render their movies?
Servers, all networked together in huge renderfarms, they run linux too :yes: 
whoa, thats a freakin huge server! What do you think the render time of an average length movie would be on one of those?
23 seconds.:yes:
There would be no render time! Its so fast, it renders way before you press the render button!
how much do those go for?
nah that’s not true. I’m sure that each server works on a different frame. and a single frame can take 1+ hours especially with the 3D work they put out. And with a 24fps film being 1.5 hours long, that’s about 129600 frames to render which still takes time… loads of it. Server farms are vital for these large production movies. Could you ever imaging a couple of computers rendering that many frames with such intensity?
the computers that rendered toy story probably took about 24 hours of rendertime to render a frame, you’ll notice that there’s very little in terms of rendering effects only shadows and the occasional reflection.
fast forward to Up! The renderfarm is probably taking the same amount of time to render each frame even though computer speeds have increased immensly since Toy Story. Why? The rendered models are much higher poly, there are more of them, the textures are a much higher resolution, the shadows are of a much higher quality, there is reflections, refractions, caustics and realistic light rays being calculated and bounced around every shot. And that list barely covers the start of the differences between a Toy Story and an Up! shot.
As the hardware capabilities increase more render intensive effects and techniques can be added without compromising the render time.
It also allows Michael Bay to keep making increasingly stupid movies :evilgrin:
yeah, even there was a scene that took 48 hours to render a single frame. it was ilm’s project for transfomer 1…
I want one. Or two… god it must feel like you own SkyNet… Schweeeeeeeet.
i’m guessing that the render farm would be active for pretty much the whole project, giving preview shots initially and then starting to render out each completed scene as it’s finished. So… I guess the time it takes to render a movie is the entire length of the production time?