How long is each frame taking? Did you start it this morning or last night?
As for the next project I would think in terms of your goals, and then simplify from there. What about an animated low poly teddy bear?
Each frame approx 1.48 and i started this morning.
I will do low poly teddy bear thanks
Ok good.
And don’t let me sway you on what your next project should be. Feel free to do whatever interests you. Take a look at some of these for inspiration.
http://www.colourlovers.com/web/blog/2008/09/16/33-masters-of-cg-art-awesome-digital-inspiration
Sent you a pm about it. Great for inspiration thanks
The render has finished. What is the next step?
Upload it to youtube and wait for the ad money to start rolling in!
Go to your tmp folder and watch it with a media player. If you don’t have one, vlc media player is open source and plays everything.
http://sourceforge.net/projects/vlc/ download install and watch it.
If you have a google account, upload the video to youtube and post it here. You copy the url from youtube and insert it almost like an image (you click the film icon right next to image in a post)
If you don’t have you tube, upload the .avi to dropbox and post a link here or pm it. I’d like to see what the result was.
i went to the tmp folder and all i saw was the frames and i accedently did it with png. Will it still work with png? I just named it video
It is possible to convert a series of pngs to video, but you need different software (**edit: maybe it’s possible with blender, but I’m not sure). I have a piece oif software that will convert jpegs to video, but not pngs.
It’s a good ides to do a very small (100 x 100) low sample (like 5-20) samples of the video, this is just to make sure you haven’t done anything weird, like forgetting to hide/or show certain objects in the outliner, sometime si hide the layer my lights are on…
I would change your setting, outPUT to “AVI JPEG”, size chop in half, samples to 20. Get it so a single frames takes about 3-4 seconds, and render the video out in a couple minutes. If everything looks right in the avi video, then you increase the size and samples and let it cook for a few hours.
started the rendering of the 20 frames
I have windows media player will try that.
I sent you another pm with the video.
I sent another pm to you
the frames are about 1.37 to 1.40 each.
Well here is my first animation. Not the best but hey it works.
My thanks to Photox who was there with every step of the way. Your awesome.
Please comment so that I can improve the next time.
Bravo! 
One idea for an over night render would be to get rid of the donut, or delete it’s keyframes.
Instead key frame the sun at frame 1, and then go frame 100, or 250 or whatever and move it and rotate it a little and add a keyframe, as a sort of timelapse of the shadows moving.
You could keyframe the camera too, maybe it’s pushing in for a tighter shot, or slowly panning across the table. Who knows. It’s like Bob Ross says: it’s your world, you do what you want.
Anything can be keyframed. I mean anything*
*almost anything
Don’t render out to video files unless your doing an opengl render. When you Render out to video files if a frame doesn’t render right or the power goes out your left with a bad video file.
You want to render out to eather png’s or jpg’s at the stage your at later you might want a higher quality format like openexr or tiff. Once you render out your frames you go into the video editing layout and import the image by hitting SHIFT A image or at the bottom menu add image, then navigate to the image sequence hit a. A will select everything just like it does in the 3D view. Then import your images, then you can choose your video format and render it out.
Rendering the video sequence is like an opengl render, it doesn’t take very long.
My video are always just quick tests, and I’m not pushing them into a post pipeline so I just go for the easy way and render directly to video. But Tardis is right, you definitely have more control and have access to the uncompressed frames to do more with them and it protects you from outtages and bad frames. I have never had a bad frame, although I’ve seen threads where it happened, as for outtages if you can get your hands on a ups (uninterrupable power supply) that will protect you from that and spikes.
I’m looking to do more video and will probably finally be opening up AE and the blender video editing stuff and I will probably want to do all kinds of batch editing and filters on uncompressed frames.
Thanks Tardis Maker I will see about doing that next time.
Thanks Photox I will be back with another wip soon
I’ve never had a bad frame eather, but when I was starting out I would render out to video files and about half the time my files would be corrupt. Then I saw Blender Guru’s How to render animations like a pro quick tip tutorial.
@spanishrose
For your scene the only thing you can really animate without making I look messed up is the camera or you could try doing some sort of fluid sim though.
Thanks for the suggestion
Your welcome, look forward to seeing something a bit more interesting then a doughnut leaving it’s icing behind.