Pear Butter Animation

Notes:

This took 36 hours to render for 105 frames (about 20 minutes per frame). That might seem a lot, but I can explain.

If you were not already aware, I've been using a more pleasant looking shader for the ponies lately. It's called sub-surface scattering. I won't go too in depth what it is, but if you've ever held you hand up to a light with all your fingers touching each other and you see sort of a red glow as the light passes through your skin, that's sub surfacing.

But anyway, that's the main reason the renders are taking a while longer to render. It's a much better looking material, but it requires a significant amount more samples than a normal material to not come out looking noisy. For Pear Butter, I would have to use an insane amount of samples to accomplish that normally (about 16384 samples per frame), but thankfully a beta version of Blender exists where there's a tool called a "denoiser".

It does exactly what it implies, it smooths out the noisiness of the image that would come with a slightly undersampled render. Now I can't just render reach image with 16 samples or something and denoise that. It'll still smooth it out, but there would still be a lot of artifacting because the low sample count doesn't allow the render to gather enough detail to get anywhere close to a good looking image with or without denoising.

This animation had 4096 samples per frame, exactly 4 times less than I normally would need without denoising. If I didn't have that tool from this beta version, It would have taken 144 hours (6 days) to render everything. And if it weren't for my generous donators (you all know who you are), I wouldn't have had 2 GPUs to render all of this on, so in that case it would've been a 288 hour render. All in all, 36 hours is not bad at all with these new materials.

Now for the animation itself… I spent a few days on it. No precise hour count again this time. Honestly I spent a lot more of my time tinkering with the lighting, something that wouldn't have looked that great before without sub surface scattering. Hopefully it looks fairly nice. Only real regret is the rim lighting, which might be just a touch too much. But other than that I'm pretty happy with how it looks.

Here's a link to all of the raw image files used for the render: https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B-VCBZ7TNmWDVi1CVkF0bmItTW8