Rendering

With shots ready to be animated you would have thought yeah render render render. However, even before this there are so many things to think about and now that Grigs is mainly working on SPLAY it falls to me. We need to light and link objects, change textures, put the nCloth in and make sure its working and set up the layers then get it ready for Qube, then wait for qube! I have found qube a hit and miss sometimes it is amazing whilst other times i feel like it has gone to sleep for a bit, either way it is probably our fault or a bit of both.

So, i have made a new friend Simon Osbourne who knows alot about the render farm and has helped me understand a little bit about how qube works, which is very useful knowledge. He believed one of the reasons qube didnt like our files was because of the shear amount of textures, lights etc. So we met him halfway by lowering our textures whilst he beefed up the render farm, which seems to be good at the moment.

Also whislt things werent going our way i did a render diagnostics which basically shows signs to how well maya will perform the render, we had 216 problems at one point. With textures it said we should change to .map files which are a certain file maya and other 3d packages recognize, this can be done within maya, after doing this the problems went down to around 50. Which is good.

Theroies on what we can do! Well we were aiming to have a trailer for this week, which is unlikely, i was trying to cut corners but couldnt think of much.
Then Edgley rang me up one night puzzling me 'what doesnt move in the base shot?' i was a bit confused and answered 'the machine?'
'yeah go on'
'errr, everything but the Ed and the duvet'
'so why are we tring to render out 700 machines for this one shot if it doesnt move?'
'oh'

So, on wednesday i invested some time into rendering in layers. A basic environment, but producing shadows from the bed and an occlusion of the same. Yhis would be a one off render, that we can put in to the base shot compositing. Then we have a colour and occlusion layer of Ed and the Bed, we are then ready to render, qube also loves this new way of rendering and so does batch if we have to fall back on that!