Blender is rendering my short animation too slow!

Question

I have a small problem that I just encountered. My Cycles render is too slow, even though I just need to render 120 frames total! It takes literally 4 hours to render 1 frame, and now on my third frame it says it will need 11 hours to render/denoise!! I don't know what to do, as I reduced the sample size and increased the render tiles to 256 by 256 (GPU compute). I got those tips from another website and I thought it would help? Someone please help! I'm very new to Blender, so I need a very detailed but easy to follow tutorial

Answer 1

Welcome to the hard reality of 3d Rendering: rendering takes time, a lot of it.

The more detailed and complex the scene, the more resources are needed to render.

You have three options:

1. Use more powerful hardware, more processors, faster processors, more GPUs and lots and lots of RAM.

2. Use a render farm, that will render all the frames using many computers, freeing your own. If every frame takes 4 hours to render and you use 120 computers simultaneously, then you can render 120 frames in 4 hours! Or use cloud computing to have access to higher specs hardware. Do a search for Amazon elastic compute clud, or other similar solutions.

3. Adjust your expectations to the hardware available to you. Create and optimize your scenes in a way that you can render them within your means, and in a reasonable time.

Answer 2

Your animation looks extremely detailed, so it would make sense that it would take that long. As far as I know the only ways to increase render speed is to either make what you're rendering less complicated or make your render less detailed (ex: lower resolution).

The big thing that would increase render time in this case would be lighting and translucency. Fewer light sources or less detailed materials could speed it up but you would be sacrificing quality in the final animation.

You could try using a different rendering engine but I don't know if that would help.