So when artists are rendering animations, are they keeping their computer on for the whole duration of the rendering? Like even for couple of days in a row?
It depends on the project's complexity. For example, HydraFXX uses a render farm, likely doing the animation on his PC and then rendering it in the cloud. At Drills3DStudio, they mentioned multitasking: some are rendering, while others work on the environment, etc. So yes, they do need to keep their computers on until the rendering is done