limitations of 3D animation

Limitations

After researching into the process of animation  in the 3D form, there are two big set back that arises from this form of animation, even though the results can be extraordinary, there are two main problems with the increase in the technology.

The Size!

And the time it takes to render!

with the ever increasing poly counts and quality of renders, the file sizes and render times are getting immensely big, just for examples sake

here is an example of a low poly sphere compared to a high poly sphere:

as you add more and more high poly objects in the scene, the renderer has to work a lot harder to process all of the data, which in turn increases the file size dramatically.

Also with more realistic renderers, such as mental ray. here is a scene which I threw together to demonstrate the issue at hand, here is the comparison

Maya software renderer

 Still quite a nice render, but compared to the mental ray render it doesn't look near as realistic.

Mental Ray

As you can see this render look a lot more realistic, all I had to do was switch renderer to mental ray.

The renderer takes alot longer due to all the attributes that need to be calculated.

To contextualize this issue lets look at the film Avatar.

according to BBC's clickbits,  the entire rendering of avatar took 1 Petabyte of data, which amounts to a 32 year long MP3 file. which is absolutely mind boggling!

but more astonishingly is the time in which it took to render, one frame ... ONE FRAME took 47 hours to render.

This is just crazy! so it really goes to show how invested these companies have to be in order to produce these films, but it also shows the limitations linked with 3D animation, how it takes a lot longer to create a feature film compared to the conventional filming method.