New Blog

Hey got a new blog now its now this...

http://simons3dstuff.blogspot.com/

or

simonharvey.carbonmade.com

Rendering

Its crazy rendering is such a big process, it is such a vital part and making sure everything works properly when it comes to compositing. It is so painful to come in, in the morning and see that your render on the farm is complete yet when you open it something i (we as people) have done wrong. Meaning that whole evening has put you behind its these silly mistakes that turn your day into a bad one, but i have had a great day schedule.

Get up 7ish
Breakfast with Sky Sports News
Play Call of Duty for 30mins
Wash
Clothed
Make lunch
Get to college for 8:30
See renders
Redo renders if needed or composite them
Whilst lightlinking a new shot on my laptop
Set up a render
Have lunch
Check renders
Light link
Set up a render
sometime after 7 leave
Play Call of duty or see girlfriend whilst rendering backgrounds of shots
Sleep at 10:30

Some of the shots!

These are just some of the shots i worked on showing you the lights i used and the final out come of using the light setup. I wish i could put them all on but there really isnt enough time with the amount of work left to do for Friday!

But yeah it jsut gives an insight into what i have been doing!

Lighting Is Done!

Yep thats right, all the shots are lit and are now either movs or are rendering at the moment, so thats all gravy for us and with some motivation the film can be finished for friday hand in. Ther are shots that i want to go back to but i am happy with how my abilities within lighting have developed and it just shows that with a bit of time and patience you can achieve something. I just wish this was the same for animation, but for now i am pleased with the skills i have. Its crazy thinking that i have pretty much inputed lighting in every shot along with Grigsbys lighting he did for us. So yeah once agian i am on to compositing these shots along with alec which has been a great aid, and always wanting the next bit from me, which has kept me on my toes and working hard. Tomorrow will be a day of sorting out folders which i am worried about, i think it may take out the whole day, but needs to be done well! Leaving friday to finish odd bits and bobs and the final shots to composite. Below are jsut some examples of the shots and what was required i also have a quick eample of how i changed the setup.

Its been tough and it has definatly taught me alot about lighting especially light linking something i wasnt to sure of before this project, but it is definatly a useful tool when it is working as i have had some problems with it.

Facts and Figures

Today was a good day got four shots done and yesterday i got four done as well, so that means 35 shots have been turned into uncompressed quicktimes. 9 are rendering as we speak leaving 16 left for next tuesday at the latest, so i work it out as around 3 a day. Tonight i hope to have another one ready and start a second, who needs sleep when we are in panic stations.

But yeah apart from being tired occassionally i am happy with what i have learnt and achieved, in term 3, in lighting and compositing, which i really enjoy making me think about what my specialism is and at the moment i really dont know. I definatly know i am not an animator!

Alec and Dan have been doing an amazing job with animating on polished off and i just love to open a new file and watch their animation, before lighting it and just hope i do it justice, but with every shot i am learning something new about lighting and what i should do and tweak. they hope to finish animating on saturday meaning they can take some of the load of me in compositing, which is great news.

Some Shots

Well, it has been so busy i am finding it hard to get some quality time on the blog, but we are halfway their in terms of rendering which is good and at the moment Im working on some key shots, which will make my life easier as i can recycle the light setup in some shots, like we have done with the base shot.

But today i rendered two shots they arethe bum hitting bed and the ding, i have worked on and off the ding as i wasnt happy with the results, but i am now and below are two screengrabs from these shots. The bum hitting bed was enjoyable and i added fake depth of field within after effects, i cant wait to use a bit more depth of field with some of the other shots!

.ma to .mb error

Ok well i was working on a shot today when it suddenly crashed, i was able to reopen it as a .ma file, i started doing all the work i wanted on it, light linking, changing shaders etc. When i went to save i wanted to save it as a .mb and this error came up...

Error: File contains unknown nodes or data. To preserve this information, the current file type cannot be changed.

Bit anoying as i was worried if the render farm would understand .ma so i did some searching on the internet by putting this error into google and a cg forum came up so i looked at it and some guy called Richard said type in...

Is -type unknown;

this brings up a list of unkwown nodes and for some reason it was looking for renderMan so the way to do this is to type in...

'delete Is -type unknown';

this will deleate the unkown nodes and allow you to save as .mb