Not the best, but my client sent it as an example of what he is looking for. I remember reading animations can go from $100 to $400 per second, and up. So, a 4-minute animation would be around $24,000 - $96,000; however, this one would be on the lower end of those numbers.
I looked at the RTX 3090’s and if you can find them, they are from scalpers and marked up to around $2000. A couple of these might make short work of it and would save dealing with a render farm.
I think that they are a lot of work when doing them conventionally. Vantage I don’t think is the answer yet, but maybe one of the other suggested softwares.
i dont see it being majorly different than doing it in vray.. its not like the old days where you had to wrestle with vray settings and hacks to get a clean animation. set up your cameras, animate them (the ones in your example are literally two keyframes each camera.) , set it to render. maybe tweak the AAmin rate, and lightcache settings as suggested in the tooltips.. if your scenes are set up for gpu you can probably bash out something like that overnight on one workstation.
your price estimate seems a touch high for this day and age… 10-15 years ago it was that and even much more… nowadays, on a scene which has already been built, i usually charge about 2-3x the price of a still for each shot, with render costs seperate if i need to use a farm..
I have never gotten a clean animation in a time that made sense in V-Ray. Maybe, I am just not got at it. So, what would you all be charging for the 4-minute animation, like the one he referenced.
Personally, I would get it set up for the best acceptable quality/frame time and then check that total render cost on a farm calculator.
A quick estimate I just did with Rebus, at 5min per frame (6000 frames, cpu render), based on your spec is around 2k USD. That would vary per frame of course, so adjust for that.
Add on your margin for the organisation, optimising/testing, previews etc. plus whatever more for fixing errors, comping, extra frame time and beer
I have had bad experiences with render farms. I have had projects estimated for X and it ends up being 4X more expensive, being told a frame got stuck or something. Uploading assets and then of course last-minute changes after the animation is completed.
The calculator doesn’t care about the frame size, only the time taken for a frame; so if your chosen frame at whatever resolution takes 5 minutes on your machine spec, then the calc is based on that.
It is mostly reliable if you average the times between simpler sections and harder sections.
You can try it yourself of course - you just need an account registered
EDIT: Yes, trusting anything to a farm is a judgement call, though it is a robust and widely used service and as long as your tests and scene checking is good, then there shouldn’t be problems.
I’ve used this one a lot in the past and had no issues other than an overcharge based on not enough testing having been done. Still, the project could not have been done without it and the costs were
covered.
The calculator might not care about the frame size but you sure should. The frame size is vital - otherwise the calculation is rather meaningless.
You need to know what resolution you need, you test run your machine at that resolution (across a variety of scene moments) and then put the highest / the average of those into the calculator.
But this is exactly what I said is the way to calculate the costs in the response I gave
There simply is no other way and I have experience over years of doing just this
Anyway, it was merely a suggestion based on the initial question.
I don’t know, which is why I posed the question. With animations, it seems like no money is enough sometimes, so the more the better. If all goes well it can be okay, but you can easily get under water.
