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I started learning Blender this past July and I have fallen in love with it. I've felt very accomplished by all that I learned myself, so I decided to start a project related to my job. Since I had 5 months to make it, I thought I would have plenty of time to have it completed. And that was true...until I tried the rendering process.

viewport render

The first few renders I did in Eevee were fine, clocking in at about 35 sec/frame. However, as I added more to the scene, performance drained slower and slower.

This has somewhat puzzled me because I have a GTX 1060 GPU with an i7 2600 CPU. I also have a Mac Mini with the M1 chip, and both computers are now clocking in at roughly the same amount of time, which equates to about 1 1/2 minutes to two minutes per frame.

I have completely scratched the idea of rendering this out in Cycles; this is all in Eevee. I have checked everything I have read that can slow down render times, but most of what I read is pertaining to Cycles. There must be something specific in my scene that is eating up processing power, but I can't figure out what it is.

Now this project is going to be shown at my work's Christmas party in two days and I'm starting to panic that I won't have it rendered in time. I'll pay a render farm if I have to, I just want to be sure that rendering this out myself is what it is and there's no improving it except to sacrifice noticeable quality.

I will upload my .blend file if anyone wants to take a look at it and give me some suggestions. Any help is GREATLY appreciated! :)

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1S0Tl5WlUubuVSIVtSdFTPFu4rcZGhR7j/view?usp=sharing

Edit: Screenshots of the cars

cars

...the whole room room

...the gramophone and window window

Overview/wireframe overview wireframe

P.S. Happy Holidays!

Blunder
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Jenny
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  • Some of this still applies https://blender.stackexchange.com/questions/52559/how-to-render-a-scene-faster-in-cycles – Duarte Farrajota Ramos Dec 09 '21 at 17:47
  • Congratulations on a very good animation. I would think that reducing the render samples would help the most. You could cull objects that don't appear in the scene. Have you thought about using a render farm? – Marty Fouts Dec 09 '21 at 18:01
  • maybe you know already but you could copy the blend file to both computers and let e.g. one render from 1-400 and let the other render the rest. It is also possible that you use a cloud blend file and let Blender do that syncing for you...then the output file should be the same cloud folder and you have to uncheck the "overwrite" checkbox in the output settings/output/image sequence – Chris Dec 09 '21 at 18:15
  • and for just a few month experience, you animation is really GREAT!!!! – Chris Dec 09 '21 at 18:16
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    Thank you all for such helpful input! I will adjust and play around with the settings you mentioned and see if that helps, but I have a gut feeling that this is just part of the process that all of us Blender users have to face at some point lol. Using both computers and letting each render half the project is a pretty good idea, I'll try that too. If all else fails, I dont mind paying for a render farm to make this project look as good as it deserves to be. – Jenny Dec 09 '21 at 18:19
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    As an additional side note, I greatly appreciate the compliments as well. I am the only one at my job who does anything related to media production, and doing this by myself means that alot of the people I work with don't understand how challenging this can be. So it really means alot to me! :) – Jenny Dec 09 '21 at 18:21
  • The blend file is quite big (934 MB). The scene has almost 4.7 million vertices but the number of vertices per object varies widely within the scene. The police car has 1 million vertices. Yes, it's in the focus of the camera. But do you need it this high-poly? No, you don't. The truck has only 20k (in words twenty thousand) vertices. This means you could replace the police car with 50(!) trucks, poly-count wise. Also, the ball that the truck steals has 200k vertices. That's way too many for a simple sphere object. Use modifiers where you can and only apply them when you really have to. – Blunder Dec 09 '21 at 23:09
  • Keep in mind that high-poly objects that are UV unwrapped have huge UV maps. If only a little part is visible Blender and the GPU must load and process all the data. The gramophone is another example of this. It's in the background but the disc (Circle object) has 100k vertices (=5 trucks). So the scene requires 4 GB in memory. You get the idea. Have a look here (https://blender.stackexchange.com/q/244520/107598) to identify the heavy objects. And this short video I've Been Using Blender Wrong for YEARS! - Maybe You Have Too... – Blunder Dec 09 '21 at 23:20

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