Done and Dusted

Right So I’ve finished editing sorted all my files out and am ready to burn so I thought I’s post an evaluation/ update on how it went as such.

The rendering process went less than smooth to say the least and I feel that I wasted time as rendering a large file with low quality textures which I then followed up by sorting out the file, upping the texture maps and downing the screen resolution. This then brought about much nicer results and I rendered out an ambient occlusion pass to give the piece a more defined real world look, as well as a Z-Depth pass and master beauty pass. I finished off with a wire frame vector render which was also somewhat drawn out by the loss of the Maya licence at uni for a few hours.

I also went and got myself 2 DVD’s printed onto with a design with which to present my work on as well as printing CD cases, however getting the DVD’s printed onto turned into a bit of an effort due to a spelling mistake on my part then when I went back to reprint them the technicians made a couple of mistakes firstly printing 2 of the same CD’s then printing one of the old ones with a spelling mistake on it...
But there all good and done now:






When I came to editing the piece I had previously made up the rest of the sequence using the stills I created via digital painting. So I went into After Effects after watching various tutorials on compositing and began compositing my renders. I hit a number of bumps along the way due to lack of experience with the software such as not being able to import an image sequence at 25 fps which took me some time to decipher how to change it and not being able to input the Z-Depth for my piece so I ended up creating the final movie without depth of field applied.

Editing went smoothly but one large problem has occurred with my final piece which just keeps staring me in the face every time I watch it. I ended up editing it all in 4:3 as oppose to 16:9 so therefore my final movie has nice huge boarders surrounding it. What’s more due to this and it not being edited at the size I created it for the quality has been reduced greatly and I’m frustrated to find that whilst toying with after effects as editing out my clips in 4:3 I found I had a copy of 2 of them in their original size. I must admit when I started this project I setup my work from Maya’s 70mm projection film gate (roughly 15:6.5) thinking it gives a nice wide low picture which is what I wanted from my work to enhance the filmic aspects. However I now just wish I’d gone with 16:9 as due to various errors in my editing process I ended up editing the entire piece and creating a movie in 4:3. With regards to the editing in terms of sound and cuts with the music etc I feel it has been successful but where I just feel that the quality of the picture lets it down so dramatically.
I’m please with the overall results but feel that my work is brought down by being of slightly lower resolution which in all honesty has left me a little disappointed.

But other than that I’m pleased with what I’ve created.

If I was to change anything I think I’d like to see spares snow on parts of the buildings as I feel that with the concept sketches of snow on the buildings it feels like there’s another bit of each little scene to go where the audience gets to see the snow on it which leaves it feeling a little incomplete as well as break the lighting link between the mountains and the light to stop the top of the city having shadow cast over it.

Here’s some progress screen shots:



















Here's a few software renders of the city:

























Post Render shots of the city









From here down are a few shots of the altered lighting which is sadly not present in the final render





















Here’s a number of renders of the first and last frame of each scene with the lighting link broken between the light and the mountains













Once I'd writtern the part at the top I had a change of heart and decided to spend the night re-editing my final piece and I did.
(Yes I've been slowly writing this all night)
It's much better now:)
Only problem is that all the hours of me cutting the footage in Premier to fade to the music small seem to have been offset slightly so the frames do not change and fade with the music but there's nothing i can do about that and it might even just be windows media player doing it, but other than that I'm happy!



*Just realised didn't acredit the music on the actually video...
So the music is: Vangelis - Rachel's Song*

Rendered! Now just pumping out a few screen shots

Everything’s all rendered now but I'm not 100% satisfied with it anymore.

The lighting I set up with the physical sun I set up when my mountains had a nice evil line across the top of the plain and the lighting seemed far more successful than but when I edited up the mountain plain its altered my lighting by blocking out most of it while leaving only a small fraction of my city in light.

So now it's all rendered and I've got a slight bit of down time I decided to just take a few random renders from various angles. However when I started doing this I noticed most of my city was in darkness and the shadows seemed to be very minimal.

So i checked the light links on all my geometry and they were all connected fine, so I thought to myself I'll break the connection with the mountains.

I did and I realised where I had altered the link between the mountains and the sun that it looked a hell of a lot more beautiful.
So as the projects all but over and I've got a set of final renders which are nice but could have done with that extra tweak, I've decided to not stress myself out trying to get everything re-rendered in a couple of days and submit what I've got being happy with it as an experience through the project and more importantly what I feel I've learnt through this project.

My plan is to also go back to this project once the deadline has passed. So if I can manage it deadline day before I leave for home after my submission I'd like to just set up 6 rendered over the weekend and re-render my scenes so I've got it as reference and more important for my portfolio because come time to try and get my career rolling I'd like to have that momentum behind me, despite possibly not having the final piece that may have gained me a few more marks in my final project.

Pumping out renders

I've had a fair few ups and down with rendering such as textures disspearing, render settings being far to large and texture maps far to small. Most of these proplems are down to human error on my part and not knowing really but now everything is back on track and after some thinking as well as render time It's become apparent that still my scene files are to much for the uni's computors as well as mine to run other than the well spec'd 64bit computors which are limited, which seem to be able to cope with it.

With regards to yesterday I started my renders going around 9-10 running 2 shadow map renders, an Ambient Occlusion and a beauty pass. However the shadow maps gave me problems and I ended up giving up one of the 2 64bit machines I was using to other students, so I scrapped doing the shadow maps and set up 2 Ambient Occlusions for my first and second scenes on the lower spec'd machines, as well as leaving a beauty pass of my second scene running on a 64bit machine.

I hung around with the renders chacking on the for a while then set off home to check on the render going on on my own PC, which had died... So I set up another shadow map render for my second scene and headed off back to uni to check on the progress of my other renders.
My beauty pass for my second scene up on a quick glance over looked good but then i checked it in more detail to find a problem. The problem with the scene was that from frame 104 onwards to about 270 (at that point 270 of 375 frames had rendered) had a hole which appeared in between the lower floor (benieth the ice) and a building which seemed to have moved upwards, which resulted in the physical sun lighting the area up like a christmas tree!
So as I'd intensionally come back in to set renders running overnight I decided to redo that part of the render and render it corrected and checked on my 2 Ambient Occlusions which were just lagging along slowly.

Today has brought 2 nice finished Ambient Occlusion maps for scenes 1 and 2 as well as a completed Beauty pass for scene 2. I then set up another Beauty pass this time for scene 1 (which is almost rendered now), an Ambient Occlusion for scene 3 (which is currently lagging along like anything only on about frame 80 or so) and attempted another shadow pass on scene 2 but my attempt was seeming futal due to the shadow map rendering out either completely black or white. So with no tutors about at the time to talk to about it I put an ambient and a beauty shot together in photoshop to see what the combined shots would look like and the result was quite nice. I origionally wanted to do a shadow pass just to make sure the bottom of the city seemed nice and dark and dim but I was pleased enough with the results to see the shadow pass as almost not neccisary *I'll post the picture up when I get onto my home computor as oppose to lagging my renders any more by uploading stuff at the same time*

So I decided to try and put the computor to better use and render a beauty pass of my third scene. But it didn't work and not wanting to change the render settings to lower it in comparrison to the other 2 scenes I decided to give up the PC to help someone else render and I've decided to do the final beauty pass on my third scene on the 64bit machine im currently camped out when the one thats currently rendered my scene 1 beauty pass finishes.

So I'm happy and hopefully tomorrow morning will give me a completed 3rd ambient occlusion and a completed beauty render, so i can start playing in after effects (which i watched a few tutorials on how to use and as i was guessing its like a movie photoshop as such in terms of blending and combining layers so should be easy enough to blast through that tomorrow in theory :)

The end is nigh as they say…

Ok so since my last post I got all the buildings textured, bumped, specular mapped and I’ve set up and tweed everything ready to start rendering, however due to time constraints I’ve had to forfeit the light layer of snow which I planned to texture on to the buildings as time was running low and I made the decision to texture the snow last that way I could remove it fully or save time and not create it if time ran to short which in this case it did.

Texturing the snow on would have taken some time to do due to a number of the buildings being kit bashed together and as a result me using parts of buildings at a variety of different angles so for example the snow on a ledge should be on top but if I textured it on the top of 1 building and I reused the ledge else ware in another location but turned in upside down then the snow would have been on the bottom of the ledge… Which would defy physics…

However with time running short and the decision to remove snow from this added another problem into the equation. The third scene needed footprints to give it a second element, which would have made the piece more interesting and given the piece a deeper element to it. For example footprints in the snow symbolizing someone had been there but my plan was to have both human and alien footprints and show that humans had been their but they were not along and give the piece an underlying horror element to it. But I had to abandon that due to the lack of the snow for the footprints to be in and I planed to add silhouettes to some of the windows giving you the feeling of being watched.

The second scene had the city below as that little added element to give it more of an element to be show within the city. So instead of the animation reading ‘This is an ancient alien city’ it reads ‘this is an ancient alien city, come and look at this!’
The first scene I will get to soon, as it posed problems due to me leaving it until render time as I thought of it as a small task which I could get on with while the other scene’s were rendering.

The scenes are lit with the Maya physical sun to give the scene a nice singular light source to intensify the shadows in the lower part of the city as well as silhouette some buildings creating a more dramatic effect while the buildings pass between the camera and the sun.
Anyway so here’s a few render shots while I was setting up the lighting for the scene:
- A standard software render with no physical sun or background set up


- A couple quick render with physical sun set up on its default settings, which already gives a nice finish





-These are a number of renders I did while tweeking the physical sun and ultimately I decided to have the sun fairly neutral as oppose to altering the red/blue shift to make the city either seem really cold and desolate or warm and inviting, so it gives the effect of it being livable in, but then the general look and state of the city give it an alien mystery to the place.













Also as can be seen from the pictures above in the background there is a distinct like at the edge of the background plain which I tried in veign to remove for hours and despite re making the textures and altering the UV’s the line would simply not budge, so in the end an extrusion and altering the UV’s to hide the line which seems to have done the trick but only the final render will tell…

And this is a little play on the 1k and 2k texture maps seeing the difference between the 2 which is very apparent with close up objects as the textures seem pixilated not crisp enough when the camera gets up close to some of the buildings:
-If you look at this then the pictures above the difference is mighty clear on the close up buildings at how much a 2k texture map is needed to give the close up buildings a more realistic appearance where as with the building in the distance the difference isn’t majorly apparent due to the distance between the camera and the texture map.


-Then this is a 1k version of the first scene and a 2k below (Minus the rocks in the foreground as I forgot to turn that layer on…)





The next challenge was laying out the floor of the piece, which I ended up doing on 2 separate 3k texture maps because of the size of the plains against the quality of the 2k maps on the buildings as well as attacking the ice where the buildings can be seen through the plain.
I thought about possibly boxing in some fog to give the ice some depth and give the appearance of it getting deeper and more murky but quickly decided against it due to the extra effort and render time taken to do so. Which led me to settle on using a transparency map similar to that which I had used on the cylindrical background map on the mountains.

This took a fairly large amount of time to balance out the bump and spec maps on the plain to give it the appearance of being solid but still retain the transparency to enable the city below to be seen. Mainly due to the specular map blowing the transparency out of the water as such.
Here’s a few little renders of that process:
-This is with a 2k map applied but the end result is quite pixilated against the building, so I then upsized to a 3k map in the images below which still has weaker points in it but to push it any further would have brought the render to a bit of a stand still























Then here’s a test render of the ice in the 3rd scene



So all my buildings have 2k texture maps etc on them then from that point I downsized all the maps to 1k then applied 2k maps to the objects that came close in to the camera and 3k in a couple of extreme cases to really large objects such as the ice and the long promenade in the second scene where the objects runs the entire length of the scene as the 1k and 2k maps wouldn’t cut it.

So I started nice and early Friday morning and got to uni finished off a few small tweaks as the CG rooms were still locked up and I couldn’t start my rendering, so set about making sure my render setting were set up right for my 2nd 2 scenes which I was planning to do while the 1st was rendering. There was a few other small elements I wanted to add into the scene such as the silhouettes in the windows of the third scene and a flickering light like a torch light in one of the buildings as if someone below was shining a torch up inside the building looking about, then headed through to the CG room when it was opened up.

My overall plan was to simply complete a beauty pass on all the scene’s despite wanting to do an ambient occlusion pass on each, as well as a shadow pass which would have enabled me to have a little more control over my final result. However with little time left due to time constraints this wouldn’t have been possible so I decided to settle for pure raw mental ray without to much composting in the end process.

However as is always the result in a time known to me as the 11th hour (not sure why its called the 11th hour, but it just is and is also know to many as crunch time as well) I set up camp on a few computers loaded my work onto the desktop began rendering. I sat trying to set up the torch light in the first scene, which I thought of as being a quick job. However due to somehow not being able to break the connections between the light and the buildings other than the one the light was shining inside in my scene I came back an hour and a bit later to check on the renders and nothing was happening. Mental ray had just been sitting there calculating, but not pumping out anything. At this point I made a bit of a rash decision.

My last project last year was a complete disaster due to the textures and geometry amongst other things being too much for the computers to handle and the lack of rendering that happened. So I was determined to not let that happen again, therefore I reverted back to an old maya document which just voided roughly my last 6-8hours work, with full 1k texture maps applied to everything, I then went back thought the document and updated the textures on the very large geometry to larger files but wanting to keep the texture size down I did it as sparingly as possible, then set them rendering and give myself a little break due to the stress of just backtracking and downgrading my work which I was so please with a few hours before.

This time I came back to check on it and it was rendering good and steadily but to my horror when I opened up the image folder that maya was rendering it was rendering black images!
I stopped all the renders once again and found the route of the problem, which turned out to be the old file had the setting set up to my computer at home and despite setting the correct project before starting this second render the texture files disappeared after the first few frames of each render. At this point I felt really dishearten and set up al the texture, bump and spec map files by hand reloading each individual one. Then I took the entire project file and copied it to each of the other PC’s I was using to make sure everything came out the same, while setting up the render settings again and eventually setting the renders going.

From this point I felt defeated, but I kept checking back on my renders regularly and seeing the very slowly progress. The lighting sadly seemed to have altered itself, which I didn’t realize until the scenes started to get further into the render but I didn’t, wasn’t to stop them rendering and start again so I just let them trawl on.

I’m now sitting on a rather sluggish, tiny-screened old computer, which lives, in my study while trying to get some blogging down despite epically slow progress due to my own computer trying to punch out a render. I set PC’s at uni rendering my first 2 scenes and left them to come back Monday morning to hopefully find them crunched out nicely. Then I set up my own computor to render yesterday while I worked all day yesterday at my job. Despite it having 15 hours of time to render it still only managed a bit over 150 frames of a 350-frame animation done though. So it’s spent all night rendering as well and I was quite disappointed with the results in comparison to the 2k versions which I had previously been staring at renders of for the last few weeks. So again it felt like a kick in the groin because it seems to be deteriorating in front of me. It has also come out somewhat flat as well in comparison to the 2k version which had a lot of nice bumping and specular highlights on it that the higher quality maps gave it which in term upped the level of realism of the piece.

However there is a possible upside to this as I reverted back to an older file I had gone back to an older camera, which I had since altered to extend the animation out. But this older file still had a shorter animation on 2 of the 3 scenes as I had altered the newer files so the camera started at moving at frame 25 and finished at frame 375. Where as the older ones started moving from 0 going through to about 220 at the smallest then about 280 and 350 on the other 2.

So its cut my amount of scenes down enabling me to render less and I can take the first frame of each animation and cycle that image to give the 25frame pause on each animation in Premier.
So with that in mind I thought this would be a good point to drop in a couple of playblasts of the animations before I reverted back to the older Maya file.
*But where my PC is rendering I can’t open up Premier to edit them into an animation so it’s going to have to wait until rendering is over and done with… *

With this slight cut down of frames I decided to have a little experiment with render layers to try in vain to save what little of the project I was left looking at and take the blandness of the piece and give it more punch. I also found about setting up a gamma node and plugging into each texture, bump and spec which I previously had no idea about to give the Maya physical sun more realism. However at this point its to late to go back over and do this so I’ll keep that in mind for the next project which will hopefully enable me to give my work more realism without needing render layers as much.

I’ve never used render layers before on a project, although I’ve watched a Gnomon DVD, which went through compositing in Shake. However due to not having Shake I was a little baffled, I’ve also got a couple of DVD’s which I’m borrowing from uni on how to composite and light scenes but due to the Gnomon DVD’s being so n depth and thourgher as well as taking a long time to watch. At this stage of the project I don’t have time to watch them so I’m forced to go in relatively blind, other than an old tutorial I did on how to render in layers but composite in Photoshop and I’ve not got much compositing experience so I’ll just have to make the best of what I can using after effects which is still a bit of a mystery to me…

However on the up side of everything I rendered a single frame in a shadow and a ambient occlusion pass just to se what I could make of it in Photoshop and the result is better. The shadow pass is very quick, however the ambient pass is as slow as the full render itself, so therefore I’ve set a full ambient batch render of my second scene going as in my opinion it is the most impressive of the 3 and if it’s a choice between getting that one looking the best and chancing it a little with whether the renders at uni are running ok and will finish or rendering an ambient pass for the scene I’ve got sitting on my home computer I’d rather take the risk as I want to get the best out of the project I can. Also the second scene is bay far the darkest due to how hemmed in my buildings it is so therefore if any scene needs it most my bet is that it’s that one.
I’ll post up the composite picture I made testing the render layers at a later point as it’s on my other computer, which is still rendering…

Also with my pc currently struggling to render I can’t jump on after effects and have a play so once I’ve finished blogging this I’ll YouTube it up for some tutorials and see if I can get my head about it a little on this laggy little beast of a computor…