Rendering begins

I set up some renders over the weekend at uni, to render out my time machine that is.

I set some up Thursday night but came into to find problems as seems to always be the way with my work when it comes to render time...
Anyway I ended up spending nearly all of Friday tweaking and altering render settings to try and get a good enough render that I was happy with.

I've never really understood render settings overly loads to be honest and it felt a little trial and error which I feel I've never really had as it's been get the render done and I haven't had the time to play around and tweak before. One thing I did find out which was fairly obvious anyway but still shocked me a fair bit is how much longer final gather adds to render time!

It shoots it up so much!

Anyway in my effort to speed up the render over the weekend I decided to take out all the wires in my scene, and instead render them out separately on my home computer then composite the 2 layers later in after effects.
I was thinking this would be simple and easy, however upon assigning a black shader and turning off all the secularity etc (to give me an alpha to work with when compositing with the main render) I found that the render settings I was using for my main scene were pushing the render time up hugely just for a render of a few little wires, and after trying a number of different render settings in mental ray the scene still seemed to be taking ages.
I'm guessing was due to the high poly count of the scene, even with the objects all blacked out. So I made the decision to render the wires out in software render to speed things up a little.
However I went off to work yesterday and after about 2 hours of rendering my piece got to frame 177 out of 750 and just stopped rendering...
The render settings were set to go to frame 750, however it just wouldn't render...

Upon getting home from work about 15 hours later, I realised this and then started rendering again from the frame that died on me so to speak. Troughout the night maya kept just stopping at random intervals throughout rendering which in some cases prompted my fan to go mental waking me up to check everything was running, to find it wasn't and restart the render.

But after a night of stopping, starting, rendering, sleeping and not sleeping I woke up this morning and set the final part of the render going, and it's now finished!

Ideally I wanted to get the dynamics in the scene rendered out overnight last night and just finish off with final tweaks for my jungle today, but my render problems have thrown a spanner in the works as such. So I'm going to leave my dynamics until tomorrow as I'll set them rendering at home when I head to uni to check out my main renders.

To keep myself on schedule though I'm going to get my jungle sorted today so I can set it rendering tomorrow at uni if my time machine scene has been good and rendered itself out over the weekend that is...
Anyway that's me for today I'll get on with some work now.

But here's a few renders of my time machine while I was texturing it and one from when I was tweaking the render settings and stripped out final gather, I would post up the duff renders it did over thurdays night but I've left them on the uni computors...

















And this one is rather dark, but this is when I stripped final gather out. So the final renders should look somewhere between this and the above render.
Hopefully!



Thanks for reading

Progress update

I've defiantly been slacking on the blogging front where I've been trying to get my work busted out so to speak.

So here's a little update on what I've done; I've got all the UV's laid out for my time machine scene and partially began texturing, as well as having some small bits of animation on some components and added particle effects to give the time machine scene more of a feel something is happening.

However the time machine scene seems far more abstract in terms of camera movements, as the jungle and time square are more geared towards a first person perspective walking along. Then after talking with Mark from Nexus studio's I've come to the conclusion I need to rework the camera in this first scene as it doesn't fit particularly well with the rest of the scenes as a whole and feels like a breakdown in coherency. So I'm going to stick with how the camera begins in the start of the scene and instead of having a fly through over the ship and the particles have the camera pan round a little from the edge where it starts out.

Here's a little playblast of how it looks now (Before being altered):
Excuse the squished format... Should be in 16/9.



Next up the cretaceous jungle, the lighting has had a bit of a rework in which I'm not using a portal light instead of spotlights with filters on them, as well as a volume fog replacing the cone fog on the lights. I've got through and updated all of my textures and materials to mia material X shaders to give the textures more of a realistic punch. However with the lighting setup and fog, the bump maps have to be far more bumped to give a similar effect to what I'm aiming for. getting to grips with mental ray textures has been somewhat of a task to as I've been using the colour, bump, and spec maps I'm use to using in software shaders as well as transparency which took me hours to work out how to use and I was on the verge of posting something up on the uni blog about it as a cry for help.

However I found how to do it in the end and for anyone who's interested if your looking to have textures on planes with a transparency plug in your transparency map to the 'cutout opacity' under advanced in the attributes editor.

I've also taken another texture hunting trip to get myself a canopy which I've began to cut out transparencies for as I'm going to used textured plane's similar to hair cards for the foliage overhead.
A few renders of the last few days work:




























And last but not least time square.
Or rather last and least, I haven't really sunk my teeth into this so much lately, so since my last post I haven't made any changes to the scene. However the next thing on my list is sorting out the camera push in this scene more to a walking pace with less distance on it but I'm still thinking of having the pan upwards on the end of the scene to portray the overwhelmingness (not sure whether that's a word) of this altered reality.

I'm in 2 minds with what to do really my intuition is telling me beat the life out of that jungle scene and get it ready for rendering! Then get on with texturing and tweaking the time machine, and finish Time Square last as that would give me max rendering time in the scenes which in reality are going to be the most render intensive scenes which leaves just time looming closer to the deadline as oppose to all 3.

Or just work on bringing them all to the same level and render them all at the same time. But i can see that turning into a bit of a disaster really....

Any feedback or opinions on everything would be awesome,
Cheers for reading.