As part of animating the iMac just recently posted I am now testing close up shots to get a feel of how to best set the render pipeline up to minimise render cost. As the iMac still render was done with 5000 samples and a render time of app. 15min on a gtx670, this is certainly not fit for purpose for animation. The current close up shows a 200 samples cycles render with b-spline node compositing, added DoF (no motion blur yet - as this is without movement yet) and some additional glow compositing. The render time for this still was app. 2.5min plus 30sec compositing - resulting in 3min overall estimated creation time. This is just barely the border I would see feasible for creating a first 120 frame animation as a fly over - resulting in estimated render time of 6 hours. This would be a big improvement over a 30 hour estimation at 5000 samples - and I think the quality should be fine for the movie afterwards.
