cyrusfm

My first Blender animation - Scarlet

Published: February 14th 2022, 1:23:33 am

So when I said that this would be done on the 10th... yeah I definitely cursed it.

My first Blender animation! It's a simple one and rough around the edges but I'm very happy with it. Two general thoughts I keep having using Blender, especially compared to SFM:

Holy hell, everything looks so good.

Holy hell, everything takes forever to render.

I'm sure my render settings are scuffed, my project files are poorly set up and my hardware is definitely outdated (I actually found out my GPU has a unique reputation for being especially bad for Blender, on top of just being outdated. Yay!), but to explain the scope of slowness we're talking about: In SFM, depending on the complexity of the scene, it usually takes between ~10-40 seconds to render a single frame. If I put an unreasonable amount of characters, lights and unnecessarily high settings for a SFM frame, it might take 3-5 minutes to render at  the absolute most. For this animation, rendering a single frame took 50 minutes while I wasn't running anything else on my computer, and well over an hour when I was actively doing something else. The animation is running at 60 frames per second and is much simpler than all of my SFM animations (in terms of length, number of characters etc.), so you can imagine why I'm astonished by how slow it is.

On the 9th, when I said this would be done the day after, I was almost done rendering. When I looked at the result, I saw that there were a few issues I'd have to re-render. After the "fixed" version was done I noticed that I messed up the new render aswell. 5 days and 8 renders later... Here we are!

I definitely want to keep exploring and get better at Blender, but at least for the foreseeable future the animations will be irregular and simple, along the scope of this one. Long projects would actually take weeks to render. At some point, with better knowledge of Blender and better hardware, that will hopefully change though!

Now, after a week of almost non-stop rendering these handful of frames, I'm just looking forward to using my Computer at less than 100% CPU and GPU usage again. 😅