I’ve made this simple little plugin, free for personal use, that can tell you how long you’ve spent rendering an animation so far. Some plugins estimate time remaining in an animation render, but this is the only plugin I’m aware of that tells you how long you’ve rendered an animation for.
Ever wondered how long your computer has been rendering an animation for? Now you can click 1 button and find out.
How does it work?
When rendering an animation into a sequence of images, Blender saves certain information into the image header. If you’ve ever loaded images into the video sequencer, and noticed information above and below the image, you’ve seen this metadata. What this plugin does, in the click of a single button:
- Check your render directory
- List all the files inside the render directory
- Add up the render time for all these files
- Tell you the total render time
What file formats does it work with?
Total Render Time works if you’re rendering to JPEG, PNG, or OpenEXR, which covers the vast majority of animation renders. This is limited because Blender can’t always save render information - for example, when saving an animation to TIFFs, Blender doesn’t save render time into the header.
If you use another image format, and you know that Blender saves render time into the format (you can check this by opening the image in a sequencer and look for additional information around the image), then let me know and I’ll try to add it in a future release 