"Didn't I hear at 1 point that Toy Story took 2 1/2 years to do???? That said, I'm sure the times to develop such movies has decreased dramatically." I don't know how long ToyStory took exactly, but that movie was made like 10 years ago. So 10 years from now, we're talking a 20 year difference in technology development, so yeah... those rendertimes, etc. are/will be obsolete. nVidia said something like another 10 years for real-time photorealism, so a full-length movie rendered in real-time would only take a couple hours to render. ;-) Even the fastest render engines out there today, still require a relatively long time to render photorealism at film resolutions, and only recently has true GI/HDRI become viable for animation rendering. GI is still 'faked' most of the time for movies, because faking it is still much faster than running true GI calculations over the course of tens of thousands of frames, so it saves time and money.

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Tools :  3dsmax 2015, Daz Studio 4.6, PoserPro 2012, Blender v2.74

System: Pentium QuadCore i7, under Win 8, GeForce GTX 780 / 2GB GPU.