alt Hacker NewsThis on a M5 Max machine with 40 core GPU and 48GB ram is pretty fast. Preview cycles directly on the canvas without much delay. Can't say the same on my older M1 Ultra machine. Blender has come a long way and is very impressive how it is evolving in such a good way.
I worked on a short this past year, primarily on an M1 Pro 32GB. This was mostly compositing a single visible model into a scene and modeling shadowcatchers, lighting, holdouts, etc. Modeling was typically fast, but I was surprised at what tanked render times and how there was little ability to debug what that was. A modifier here, a filter in the compositing graph there, and something that started as a 10s/frame render jumped to multiple minutes with no way to easily identify the culprit other than a binary search through half a dozen configuration panels.
That and the lack of easy portability (say modeling on my Mac and then handing off to a more powerful (or less utilized) desktop for rendering), made the learning curve steep.
I’m a novice and barely got the things done that I wanted to do, but was happy with the output. Maybe I’ll do more in the future, but finding tutorials for beginners for the latest interface was also challenging.