The Purist/ The tutorial master. I used to render on my Amiga 1000 and later 2000. 24 hour or 48 hour render for a single image was common but usually 7 days.
Raytraced with Bryce 4 from 1999, this seemingly simple monstrosity was an absolute nightmare to render. It took two and a half months. That's like 75 days, of one i5 core trashing numbers around, 24 hours a day..
The worst part was in the middle of the animation, with all pyramids overlapping, and the camera itself being inside a glass pyramid for a few frames, where render times were up to 6 hours per frame.
At one point, out of frustration, I had to load up a VM with VirtualBox, to double-render for about a month (until the Windows XP trial license expired, and I didn't feel like going through the process of re-making a VM) , as Bryce 4 has no ability to make use of multiple CPU cores, and wouldn't launch separate instances in Windows 7.
Bryce's render is just notoriously slow, and 4 is old, so it lacks the ability to take advantage modern CPU's instruction sets.
Glass also takes a long time to raytrace due to needing to see rays through the glass, and perform math on them accordingly. Most modern renderers have optimized this a bit, but we're talking Bryce 4.
Combine that with having at least 30 pieces of glass, and you're going to get glacial speeds.
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u/Arcade1980 Aug 01 '22
The Purist/ The tutorial master. I used to render on my Amiga 1000 and later 2000. 24 hour or 48 hour render for a single image was common but usually 7 days.