Week 16

So this week was a wild scramble to get all of our renders done, and i'd have to say we did a pretty good job. I got the team together and we went into uni Saturday morning and cranked out about 6 scenes of renders with the help of Stuart who set up backburner for us. I was a little concerned that we would run out of time to render because lecturers were saying rendering could easily take up to a week or two but it seems we have everything rendered correctly at this point.

One of the few issues we encountered was actual render settings being slightly different between scenes so there is a small change in lighting throughout some scenes but it isn't too big of a problem because for one its not overly noticeable and two brightness can be altered in editing. Next time when working on anything with more than one environment set i think it would be smart to create a separate file for just lighting setup and render settings so that all scenes are consistent.

Another little hic up we had was that some of our scenes were just too much for the computers to handle and it resulted in 10-20 minute loading times just to open the scene or sometimes Maya would just straight up crash while trying to load the more graphics intensive scenes like my dragon landing scene which had hundreds of pieces of geometry, an animated rig and fire dynamics and shatter simulation all in the one scene.
I think another contributing factor was that our scenes had a lot of unnecessary history as well which didn't help and by that point it was a little too late to start going into all the scenes and deleting history, but it's definitely something i would avoid in the future and just keep my scenes as clean as possible to avoid trouble further down the line.

other than the handful of problems i think rendering was pretty successful and we're just waiting for the final video to be put together now.

(PS. This is not my final assessment post)