Transformers 3 Computer Graphics Production

I recently read an article about "Transformers 3 Computer Graphics Production" which states:

For a last push on the final weekend of work, ILM’s entire render farm was used for Transformers 3.

ILM calculates that that added up to more than 200,000 rendering hours per day - or the equivalent of 22.8 years of render time in a 24-hour period.

I don't understand what type of render time it is? 200,000 rendering hours per day? How is this meant?

Best Answer

A "render hour" refers an hour of computer time it takes to generate a visual image ("render") from raw input data such as a 3D model. The amount of time it takes to render a given image depends on a LOT of different factors including how complex the input data is (and how much input data elements there are, since there can be textures, lights, etc, in addition to the 3D model data). The "hour" varies from computer to computer. My personal laptop might take 10 hours to render a single image from the Bee movie, but a more powerful desktop computer might be able to do it in just 1 hour. So just knowing that Bee movie took 25 million hours isn't really much to go on. For a true understanding of how long the film took to render we'd need to know what types of computers were involved and what type of input data was rendered.

25 million hours sounds reasonable for a movie such as Bee movie, actually. Feature animated films like this are VERY time consuming to render, and if they're always rendered on large collections of computers such as the Media Grid since individual computers and even small collections of computers aren't enough. The Media Grid has thousands of powerful computers all connected together to render, for example. This is known as a "render farm". - Barbara M

emphasis added

So basically they spent 200,000 hours of rendering to process the raw images into what you see as the final product. You might want to give this resource a look to start and go from there (What is Rendering?)