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When rendering online each frame is rendered more than once to check for errors in the results. This is why the total number of frames that teams have been involved in surpasses the total number of frames in the movie.

Some scenes also had to be re-rendered to fix flaws - typically those flaws were related to the temporal upscaling (60fps vs 24fps can cause a lot of trouble) or to the 3D stereoscopic effect (things that work in 2D do not always work just as well in 3D).

The Peach movie team originally split the movie into 13 sections and further divided those 13 sections into a total of around 120 individual scenes. The exploded outer ring on the graph shows the distribution of the number of frames that were rendered during Sunflower for each section and the inner ring shows the CPU time used. Some frames took longer to render than others; ranging from a few hours to several weeks of CPU time.

One of the reasons for the high rendering time per frame is that each of the pixels in the roughly 9 megapixel frame has been calculated between 5 and 8 times with a slight shift in its position. This is called "Full Sample Antialiasing" and is a way to avoid pixelation and rugged or sharp edges in the resulting output.

During the Sunflower event more than 3 terrabytes of raw final movie data was produced. Due to the way that frame data is handled while in transit in the backend system on the server this means that at one point the Sunflower project was using around 12TB of storage space - which is more like 35TB of actual disk space with raid mirroring and backups included.

A typical raw EXR frame in the movie ranges from 20-40MB per eye. That means that if you are watching the 3D stereo 60fps version of the movie you will be seeing around 3GB of data stream by in front of you - per second.

There are a good deal of ways for artists to hide little easter eggs here and there. Did you know that the bee that briefly lands on a leaf during one of the very first scenes is actually a tiny monkey head? The monkey is called Suzanne and has a special meaning to the Blender community; similar to the well-known teapot in other 3D tools the monkey is an object that you can insert into your scenes just like boxes, cones and other simple objects. Every year there is an award ceremony at the Blender Conference showcasing the most brilliant Blender art - the Suzanne Awards.

There could very likely be another easter egg hidden somewhere in the mini-site for the Sunflower release.

Plenty of things can go wrong during a production - even when it includes only virtual actors. Blender is well-known for its highly modular and very backwards- and forwards compatible file format. Unfortunately it doesn't always work the way it was supposed to work. The first attempt at rendering the intro scene with the bird turned out to be an eye-popping experience.

Even CG animations can have problems with deforestation. The camera was supposed to have tilted upwards to look at a large trap that the bunny had set up for the rodents. In the first attempt at rendering this scene a mistake in the camera setup meant that only the background moved - causing it to look like all the trees were slowly collapsing.