Figured i'd do some charts since we've got at least a two week wait. These are based on the weeks production was completed and not the release week. Week 1 is the first Friday after a release. The final week is when the last static or animation is confirmed. I don't include Interlude in this as it's shorter duration makes the data less obvious to look at.
This therefore doesnt include any beta testing period, but would include the steam build, as this takes place after a release and some rendering probably takes place alongside it.
Still per Episode
Episode 10 alone has about 2000 fewer renders than all of season 1.
Animations per Episode
Animations had been steadily increasing but dipped after episode 8. I think this is because he started counting the long animations as 1 where as previously he counted the individual shots making up longer animations.
Average Weekly still Production
This is interesting as the last two episodes have the lowest, and 3rd lowest, average weekly still production, despite there being far more stills compared to previous episodes. This is probably somewhat explained by the increase in Animations.
Average Weekly Animation Production
This is a little unclear due to the reporting of longer animations and how they are counted. However to take the numbers at face value, episode 1 is the only episode with a lower per week animation total than 10, though 2 is very close. Average animations per week for episode 11 are hard to predict since presumably all animations will be 60 fps but also the 4080's will be in use for the duration. When DPC says the increased frame rate hasn't effected production time, this is almost certainly untrue. I beleive episode 7 & 8 were the first episodes to use the 3090's, episode 9 changes the way animations were counted and then episode 10 has a mix of 60 fps and 30fps using 3090's and 4090's.
In the 7 weeks between September 29th and November 17th 66 animations were rendered, this was at an average of 9.43 a week. Much of this increase is probably down to the fact that all three systems were focused on animations as the statics were done earlier, it is also probably the case that the animations didn't include any of the long form ones DPC talked about earlier in development. In other words it seems likely that one system with a 4080 can do around 3 60 fps animations a week, that means 6-9 is probably the most optimistic we can be. Which brings me on to this...
Season Comparisons - Season Comparisons
Season 3 is less than 2767 still renders short of the season 2 total, with two episodes to go. This will end up being more than double season 1.
Season 2 had more than 2.5 times the animations of season 1. Season 3 nearly has 2/3 as many animations as season 2 at the half way point.
However this is where things get "really interesting". Production weeks for season 3 are already higher than season 2. Season 3 already has 88 production weeks while season 2 had 87. In other words in basically the same amount of time DPC has produced 2767 fewer still renders and 289 fewer animations (With the caveat this may be a less drastic differnce with the long animation calculation change taken into account).
However even if we presume the long form animations accounts for the difference, he'd still be down 2767 statics in the same time frame.
Production has undeniably slowed, and while I do think quality has increased i'm not sure it's by enough to justify this.
