Tuesday, September 01, 2015

Back of the Envelope

So
If a frame takes exactly one hour to render in Blender (in 3D)*
and
If my computer's power draw is 240 Watts**
and
If electricity is $.31/kWh***

Then each frame costs about $.0744 (a little over seven cents).

Our movies must look this good at a minimum from here on out.
That's more than I thought. A thousand frames is nigh on $75 in electricity costs alone.  We do several thousands of frames of CG animation. And then rendering out all the movie and such, it's actually several hundreds of dollars.

§§§
*Renders take all kinds of different time. At 4K I'd say an hour a frame is about average, even optimized. Some are more, some are less. The one I've got running now is 49 minutes a frame.
**That's what the big i7 with the Quadro4000 video card is drawing. That does not include the monitor (which is usually off during a long render).
***This was the commercial rate at my studio, not my home (where my i7 is right now). The home rate should be something less. But add to this any additional fan or air conditioning I might have to/want to run when this computer is running.



3 comments:

Unknown said...

We should build a windmill powered render farm with cows and pigs, because, bacon.

Andrew Bellware said...

Hogs? You know that'll all be a methane plant and Thunderdome within a week.
In the meantime, follow-up post coming.

Unknown said...

Follow up post?!