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.