31/05/2011 - 17 Days till Deadline

Scheduling

As I have finally got scenes to render I have set my self the goal of getting 2 shots finished every day although I know this is going to change all the time as I am going to be waiting for scenes to be finished by the animators and also rendering can vary in length depending on the complexity of the scene. Tara has lent me her desktop to help the rendering get done faster and I also have my laptop for rendering and compositing on. For my production schedule rendering and compositing are in the same box as I am compositing as soon as the renders finish so that i can see if any extra passes are needed.

Ideal Production Schedule

Realistic Schedule

Rendering

Got the first 4 scenes that I could light and render today. The first was the opening shot of the mountains, most of this was pretty much set up as its the scene I had been doing render tests with before I gave it to the animator to do his work.

From my test I knew that I needed to have 4 passes to match the tests that the director liked Ambient Occlusion, Shadow, Colour/Lighting and background. Ambient Occlusion is the easiest to set up as the default usually works well in mot scene. Shadow and Colour/Lighting all relied on the lights being set up. For setting up the lights I generally used a 3 point lighting system with one light as the main light simulating the sun with shadows on and the other 2 i use on a lower intensity to simulate light reflecting of surfaces giving the animation a generally nice look to it.

Here is an example of the basic layer set up

An this is an example of the Layer when they become more complex. This typically happens with shots that have more depth to them so that can be broken down into sections for adding Depth of field and motion blur etc.

There was an issue when I started prepping the opening scene for render because when the animator imported the character the characters hypershade was a mess but were the character had been imported multiple time the scene was a mess and something went wrong with the shaders on the environment and it wasn't letting me render out all passes in one go. I didn't realise this until the batch render had finished, after spending a couple of hours trying to solve this I found the easiest way round this was to render the passes separately as I couldn't afford to waste anytime.

Here you can see a screenshot of the shading issue I was having no matter what I did in one render layer it would affect another making certain object loose their texture completely and render transparent it was nothing to do with the materials transparency as I have had that create issues before . I just couldn't work it out but once this film is finished i intend to solve this problem as it could occur in future jobs.