Wait, Rendering?!

Rendering. 
Rendering is well known to all creatives from different technical fields; but arguably, not as well known as it is to an animator. That's right, the process of finally converting all that hard work of yours may well take what seems like forever to complete before you can even see it move outside of it's production software!

Pixar studios 2001 animated feature 'Monsters INC' featured a character design with very 'complex' character texturing. One lead character 'Sully' was designed with a lot of pink and blue dotted fur which when approaching the 'new territory' of digital animation in the western world was quite the intimidating task to achieve within Pixars studios. Pixar began work on the 2,320,413 hairs on the main characters body which became quite the struggle to grasp an idea to animate this in an effective way and had to bare in mind that each hair would cast a shadow on the hair beneath. Several animation tests occurred until they achieved the animation quality needed for sullys hairs; including some sort of obstetrical course environment for the character to be tested within. After weeks of hard work on sullys hair software alone, the studio was met with the rendering time - 11 to 12 hours to render a single frame of sully.

Rendering requires a lot of computer power, which arguably the reason why more 'realistic' looking computer graphics didn't start to pop up and begin development until the 90's despite the fact computer animation had been developing since the 70's. Back in the 70's computers didn't have the capability or power to render out or support such complex animation models/effects. Continuing to this day, groups of powerful bulky computers were be clustered together and used only for rendering. The limitations of computer power previous to the 90's computer capabilities such as the Pixar computer was heavy for the industry. The poly count for eariler animations was very less then is capable in these recent years; for example comparing John Lasseters first CG animation to the game graphics from 'the last of us' it's clear to say computer power has come A LONG WAY since the 70's!