The cooler the work, the longer it takes. Generally. I’ve been working on a video project for a few weeks now that is kicking my ass. Basically, instead of finding and paying a HD videographer tens of thousands of dollars to shoot footage of a product, we decided to create a 3D model and light/animate it in 3D space. This way, we could do effects and camera passes to our hearts’ content.

Except that it needs to be produced in HD as a looping screensaver with music. Great project. Long time. And come to find out from the modeler, the final product will be over 4 million polygons. Do you have any idea how many polygons that is? Over 4 million! Do you have any idea what a polygon is? A closed plane figure having three or more (usually) straight sides! Christ Almighty!

What that equates to in plain English is that I’m going to be spending an awful lot of time waiting for rendering to occur. Rendering, again in plain English, is the processing of an image by the computer. This is done without human input, though generally as the result of it. Ever shot a Polaroid camera? I mean shot a picture, not actually shot the camera anywhere. That’s different. OK, so you know the time that it takes for the image to show up – you know, the time you hold the picture under your armpit? That’s rendering.

What’s another example. Oh, you know when you put a bag of popcorn in the microwave and start it up. OK, the time between you pressing “start” and the “beep” – that’s rendering. You are rendering the popcorn.

You know when you impregnate someone, and in 9 months (roughly) a baby pops out? That’s rendering. You have rendered a person.

OK – well your armpit, the microwave, the uterus and the computer are all rendering devices. And what to do whilst the rendering is occuring? Nothing. You wait. Therefore, by transitive theory, rendering = waiting. But it’s still technically working, because you can’t really do too much more whilst the rendering is taking place. I mean, don’t get me wrong, I’m writing this while rendering. But I couldn’t, say, play Halo and render at the same time. Computer won’t take it. It will just cry brown tears in the bed. And nobody wants that.

So I wait. I mean, you can speed it up. You can turn down the effects and therefore the realism and 3 hours can turn into 1, 15 minutes can turn into 5. But you have to wait 15 minutes for full potency. And you shouldn’t go in swimming after, for at least, what?

The pictures here below: my render to show the client camera passes and the like – took 1 minute to produce this one frame. And check the other image: it’s 2 boxes and a floor. That makes about 26 polygons total. I’m a dead man.

Help.