When you start to work it out, you realise how much time it takes for a render, I think everybody who starts in CG dreams of making a movie or a short till they realise the number of machine-hours it takes.
Weta has a massive render farm - it had about 40,000 cpus for Avatar and that was in 2009 - they've got to have more now. Given the new Avatars are supposed to be 3d (stereo frames) at 60 frames per second, they'll need it
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And each frame will be combined from multiple render layers...
Pixar also has a massive farm - but they usually render the whole frame in one go, without layering, each one of their frames can take 1-2 days to render.
If you haven't seen it - check out "Fifty Percent Grey" by RuairĂ Robinson (
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s9-MoYrXP0o ) - who did it on his own with one or two machines. I'm sure that's why he made such a minimalist short, and it probably took forever to render that 3 mins, but the idea worked for him and he was nominated for an Oscar.
Pixel Plow are very cost-effective, but let's say you have a 1 min 30 sec animation at 24 fps that renders at 30 mins a frame on a 16 core 3.6ghz machine, that's gonna cost you $400+ and if you're planning to do this on a regular basis, that's almost throwing money away.
When I did my Terragen animation - it was a one-off and I set out to do it with a budget of $250 ( I went $20 over
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) but if I was to do this regularly I'd do as Hannes suggested and get another machine. Just trawl around the net and find an affordable refurb machine ( get enough RAM though ) stick it in the garage and let it spit out frames 24/7
p.s Terragen is almost the worst-case scenario as you're generally rendering an entire frame of CG and layering isn't really practical in most cases. In the case of my short, I decided that as I wasn't doing anything spectacular with the sky, I didn't render clouds (I comped in a skydome) - that probably halved my render times.