If characters are your hangup, do what I do: cheat
97% of my character animations are Poser animations rendered against a bluescreen, with the backgrounds matted in later. Most of the remainder (those with moving cameras) are still Poser animations, just rendered with a matte painting in the background to facilitate the camera motion. The remaining 1% are Poser animations imported into Bryce, to make use of interactive lighting (these are the rarest because they take the longest to render). The former two are being used in
Retribution, while I have yet to make use of the latter.
As for hardware, I have a total of four systems that I'm using: two quad-core Dell towers, each with 8GB RAM and multi-gigahertz 64-bit processors, which handle basically all the animations. Those systems are running Windows Vista, if you can believe that...I should've taken advantage of the inter-movie downtime to upgrade them to Windows 7, but that'll come later. Then I have a quad-core Acer Aspire 8930G (one of their Gemstone Blue line) that handles most of the still background plates, also with a multi-gigahertz x64 processor. The Poser animations were rendered on my primary development machine, a more humble dual-core system with 4GB RAM and a 2.66gHz 32-bit processor.
Here's a little tip: some of the animations I'm rendering have absolutely
atrocious render times. That
Price is Right set from
Specter is one example--a simple 5-second (150 frames, 1128x480 frame size) animation could take as much as eight days to render, and that
Voyager bridge is almost as bad, with each 1128x480 frame needing around eight hours to render (so just think about how long that one scene that had a bunch of shots of the
Voyager bridge took to put together!).
My answer to this is to do one of two things:
1. Partial Renders - to the frustration of some of my viewers, background plates have appeared in some preview and demo clips that are heavily pixellated and very much only partially done. What I'll typically do is get just enough of a background plate rendered so you can tell what it is (or less than that if it's not important), and then move on with production while one of my secondary machines renders the full plate. When ready, the full plate can be easily substituted for the "quickie" in my video editor.
2. Rough Animatics - I discovered this approach while working on Scene 38, but it's a good trick because in situations where you need the entire background animation or plate and you need it quickly, because it matters that much, the solution is to render the shot using the least memory-intensive settings possible. In Bryce, this means turning off shadows, reflections, refractions, transmissions, turning off anti-aliasing and turning on the Preview Render option. This will give you a render at the proper frame size really quickly, which has the added benefit of allowing you to see if the camera motion you've made will work the way you want it, and also allowing you to line up any other effects or Poser shots you might need. Then, as before, while I move on with production, the two secondary computers do the render work, and when the real one's ready, like before, the real ones can be easily subbed in for the quickies.
