3d rendering times

off.the.walls

to get the highest quality but a low time on rendering whats the best way to do this? It took 19 hours for 20 seconds of animation. Also this is my first ever attempt at building something like this!

Attached a screen shot too show the quality.

5uspect

Well it'll depends on what software and hardware you're using.

I use Blender a lot a and you can get decent results with a CUDA capable GPU when you tweak the performance settings in the Cycles renderer. For GPUs you typically increase the tile size but reduce it for CPUs. Additionally reducing the number of light bounces and greatly affect speed with a small impact on quality if you have mostly diffuse materials.

Lone Stone

Yea same as above really, unless you have access multiple computers to render it out in bulk, it can be a pain. Depends alot on your software and then find a balance beween time per frame and the overall quality.

Best results are usually from multiple render passes that you then composite together in nuke or ae.

freelancerTax

the best way is to render is on multiple machines - if you dont have access to multiple machines you can purchase renderfarm time per ghz hour

assuming your rendering at film fps, you are averaging 2.375 mintues a frame - this does seem quite high for what you seem to be rendering. it doesnt look like you are using any GI or bounced light etc.. so the scene looks simple enough - i would expect such a scene at 1080 to render under 30 seconds per frame - i do think you could probably reduce times with the settings of your renderer without sacrificing look too much -

what software are you using? what renderer? - what resolution are you rendering at?