Due to the fact that I am taking Animation I concurrently with 3D Animation Basic, I did not have time to record my experiences and opinions during production.
PRODUCTION
-----
Below are a few interesting experiences encountered during production.
---
One reason why I was stuck without a group was because I had already begun modelling and no one shared the same interest in train porn as I did. My reason for sticking to my idea was that I had already begun modelling. However, when the time came to reuse my older creations, they literally blew up in my face. I was therefore forced to re-model everything from scratch.
Later, I learned that this was due to incompatibilities between Maya 2015 and 2014 (I had switched versions halfway through production)
---
---
While setting up rendering for the Interior shot, I encountered a bug where the test renders would show nothing but a black screen. After multiple phone calls to the instructor, Google panic searches, and general tweaking, I learned, 4 hours later, that the reason for the black screen was because my camera had clipped the wall.
---
--
During the render process, I was shocked to learn that, instead of the 5 minutes I had originally calculated, each frame was taking between 25 to 90 minutes to render. In desperation, I tried to fix the sequences mid-render, first by lowering the Final Gather accuracy, and then by disabling it altogether. I did so under the knowledge gleaned from personal tests that Final Gathering contributes to an 800% increase in rendering time. However, what I did not know was that, in my desperation to accelerate my plans, I only ended up delaying them further. These mid-render tweaks, although somewhat successful, ended up creating very different results on different frames--forcing me to literally rerender all of the scenes I had set up. Had I simply left them all alone, I would have actually saved myself much trouble.
--
