5 posts tagged “maya”
About 24 hours ago I was writing about this render. I'm still writing about this same render... granted it's actually working now, but it took way too long to figure out just what was wrong with it. Memory issues...
This scares me a bit, knowing how 5gb of ram on my mac is actually not enough to make this one scene work, I threw it over to my PC only to remember I didn't get that ram upgrade when I got the machine. No love either. So I spend bulk of my day trouble shooting the scene, cutting down, removing elements that I don't need. And I still have things to add to the scene...
I'm not happy about it, but I will most likely have to do this scene in passes, just not something I'm interested in doing right now, this scene already being a massive 12 hour render, I can't afford to lose a computer to rendering for a full day. I don't even want to think about going to school to render, I'll be lucky to find a chair to sit, getting on a fast, working computer will indeed take some major hustle and possible physical violence... 40 something thesis students and 20 usable computers... Way to go NYU.
I guess it's a good thing that I'm getting to the stage where I'm doing production level rendering at this time of the process, it's good to get an idea as to how long things are going to take in the final render. It's odd when you think about the difference in time, when I was doing After Effects work, a six hour render for 30 seconds is insane, I get worried when it takes a minute or two to render a frame.
Going to CG it's something else all together, 6 hours to render 90 frames seems quite normal and even after all this time, it's still something I have to get used to. But progress is good, as of now every scene are lit, all but two have final textures applied and now only one scene I haven't done a full res render yet. I've managed to be ahead of schedule by a bit, not a whole lot, but it's good to know that I'm on track.
On rendering, since my desk sits right next to my bed, I've gotten used to falling asleep to the smoothing sounds of spinning hard drives and revving cooling fans. I used to complain about how loud the fans gets on the G5s, now it's gotten to the point where it has become the reassuring sound that my computer is working on my project. The sound is also why I'm up right now, as the fans stopped spinning and literally I woke right up like an obsessed boss, looking over the computer's shoulder to check if it is indeed working or just pretending to work. Turns out it went for a break between frames and forgot how to start working again...
Above is a frame from a production resolution mental ray test render of my thesis. While it's still ways to go, I'm so happy as to how it came out. There are some edge buzzing issues that I'll have to address in my next render test, but as of now, I like how my shaders are looking, camera move on this shot got a little more tweaking and it's going well. I have three more scenes that's close in lighting stage. Things are good if maybe a little behind schedule, but good none the less.
Week one of the proper production of my thesis film, I've thus far focused mainly on the construction of basic elements that makes up a city. Been mostly dealing with things such as signs, railings, doors, gates, windows and cables. Production of these elements are mostly mundane busy work, challenges consist mostly of getting the scale correct and knowing at what level of detail do I go to.
The reason for pre-building most of these elements is the felicitate the smooth process of the construction of the city. By spending the time now in getting the basic elements done, I can spend more time in figuring out creative ways of using these elements.
The interesting thing about creating a city block from scratch is that you assume you get to play urban planner, that you get to decide how and why things goes where they go, similar to playing Sim City of sort, applying a certain logic in defining how the space is used. But it's a completely different thing when trying to create a location that feels organic, lived in and real, rather than fabricated.
You quickly realize things don't really make any sense, people use spaces for things the designer never intended it to be used, they add their own ideas, modified to their needs. A balcony gets closed off and becomes a living space, a doorway becomes a bay window, scaffoldings are built to hold extra air conditioning units, these modifications are limitless and rather unpredictable.
It is this unpredictability that makes creating a real looking urban environment so difficult, how much variations and details do you put into the scene? How do you balance the level of detail you go into verses the amount of detail people will actually notice? Currently I feel like I need much more detail, but somehow I feel like I might have gone overboard already.
Scene one camera move test.
