Monday, December 29, 2014

Retrospective Post #3: Production

Retrospective Post #3: Production

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

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Below are a few interesting experiences encountered during production.


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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)
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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.  
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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.  
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