Rendering

    Rendering was the most time consuming task. When we started with the project we had no idea how long the process would take. We started by rendering a single frame and checking how long this would take. To our dismay one frame took 5 minutes to render. Out of 1000 frames of the entire movie around 450 frames were real heavy to render.  

1000 x 5 = 5000 minutes = 84 hours approx.

We had just one night to render the entire project and definitely needed a computer farm to do the job. A couple of attempts to find a good cluster with good configuration was in vain as blender is not intelligent enough to use the GPU facility. 

We then turned to the Mac lab at UIC and rendered it in pieces to tens of frames on each machine for 15 hours. 

Special Note [ To UIC Students ] 

1. To use the lab we need to get permission from the Lab authorities well in advance to avoid possible complications [Other students taking up your slot, Sys Admin interrogating you when you are trying to get things done]

2. ITL department in UIC Library is specially setup to help with high end request (like rendering using multiple CPUs but is available only between 9 AM and 5 PM).

3. The CS department Lab ( with Quadro machines) can be used if we make sure in advance that we have the updated software on the machines. ( Python in our case)