Overview
This guide provides information on estimating how many Chaos credits are needed to render a specific animation project in Chaos Cloud. The suggested workflow will give you the estimated credits consumption, not the exact amount of credits needed to complete the job.
How many credits will be needed to render an animation project on Chaos Cloud?
Submit the Chaos Cloud job with the entire frame range
Let us say the animation has 1500 frames - you can go ahead and submit the whole animation for rendering in Chaos Cloud with production quality and the desired resolution.
Set the Frame Step parameter to render keyframes only
From the "Submit to Chaos Cloud" window, set the Frame Step parameter to a value of, e.g., 100. This will submit 15 frames out of the 1500 animation frames for rendering (1500/100 = 15).
Calculate approximate credits per frame
After frames are rendered, take the credits spent for the whole job and divide them by 15. This will give you an approximate credit cost per frame for your animation.
Calculate approximate credits for the entire animation
Multiplying the approximate credits per frame by the number of frames in the entire animation will give the approximate credits consumption for the entire animation job. For example:
If the approximate credits per frame are 5, then Chaos Cloud will need 5x1500=7500 credits for the whole frame range,
For simpler animations, where the camera and geometry do not change much throughout the whole sequence, you can render the first, the middle, and the last frames only.
Render the rest of the frames
To render the rest of the frames without re-rendering the already existing ones, clone the job from the Chaos Cloud Portal and use the Remaining filter below the animation Frame Range field in the Clone Job interface.