Hi Rytech.
Thanks a lot for your great comment. It is so nice, really! It was a pleasure to read.
To answer your questions, coding the system took me about a month, but I was not working full time.
Now that the system is ready, making a char from a picture takes like 8 hours, more or less, depending on the complexity of it. The entire shura animation work took 8h. It was the first testing animation we made with the system. I compared the CPU increase with my old and new computer. You can see the increase here, it was way below 50%.
(2008) INTEL CORE 2 DUO T9550
firefox +30%
chrome +15%
(2011) INTEL I5 2500
firefox +12%
chrome +8%
Edit: After some optimizations, it dropped to:
(2008) INTEL CORE 2 DUO T9550
firefox +25%
chrome +7%
(2011) INTEL I5 2500
firefox +2%
chrome +1%
You can check the CPU change in drawmove.net =), it has an animated char too. Thanks again!