Friday 5 March 2010

What it should have looked like

Sad, sad times! I wish we had had more time to render out our animation. It had so much potential. I suppose though, most of that is down to time keeping. At the beginning of this project we seemed to be quite on track, but then when group members who are in charge of designing things and kick-starting the project don't show up for weeks and weeks, it makes it kind of difficult to start working. We did though, in the end, but I think we could have definitely arranged our time better.

Anyway, this is what the final render of the room was supposed to look like:



Because we didn't have time, and because the occlusion layers were being stubborn and crashing our computers every time we tried to render with them, the content on the disk shows two seperate render layers, which for some reason, I ended up doing? I'm sure I know nothing about rendering, so I have no idea how I ended up becoming the person who renders everything out! I suppose that comes down to volunteering to doing the lighting?

I learnt a lot on this project actually. The one thing that sticks out overall I think is project timing. Making a schedule really doesn't hurt anyone, and sticking to it would help a lot to. I've found that the groups who have managed to achieve a good looking final piece are the ones who started post-production a week early. The ones who left rendering down to the last minute (like us, unfortunately), just didn't benefit from it at all, except perhaps, from learning a lesson about time keeping.

When we were rendering we decided we would split the layers up, like I mentioned in a previous post. We said we would share this between three people, so we would have one layer with lights (for mood), one with colour, and one occlusion. Something told me, while I was at home, slaving over Steve's project, that something was going to go wrong with the renders. In the end I was right. No one could manage to render out an occlusion layer on their Mac. So in Photoshop I did a few tests of what the room would look like with just with just the lights layer and the colours. It ended up looking just like the scene might at night. We didn't end up even getting this result though I'm afraid, because when it came to compositing in after effects, the layers seemed to have been set to different render settings and we couldn't get them to match up.




This was a quick render of an occlusion layer I did a while ago, to test it out. I should have known from how long it had taken to do this one second clip that we wouldn't be able to render an occlusion layer.