A New Turn

If you had read our previous post you may have come across the idea that we were running into a lot of rendering issues. If you hadn't read that post, we were running into a lot of rendering issues. Last night at around 3am as we were setting up renders in the lab, we came to the conclusion that there was no possible way that our project would be done rendering, composited and edited by the Gold Stage (Wednesday, April 10th). The thing that was setting us back so much was the environment. So, we basically deleted all of our environment - less than a week before it was due. There is no more grass, no more leafy trees that sway in the wind, no more Herbil modifiers, and basically no more paint effects. All we had left was the matte, mountains and some random plants and rocks that were modelled. Within 4 hours we recreated our environment with conical pine trees and a grass green plane for a ground. This generated a more cartoony style and thus the matte painting we had previously did not make sense. After doing a quick matte in photoshop of just clouds the new environment was a go! We implemented it into scenes and began rendering at 9am.

We are confident that this approach will improve our project for several aspects. Such as in having a consistent cartooney style and a project size that we can better manage. Although we lost about 3 weeks of environment work, this process is for learning and so we now know not to cover a whole environment in paint effects (then convert them to polygons to be able to render in Mental Ray although they are meant to be rendered in Maya Software).

Over the past few weeks we have learned what not to do with renders... Not sure yet what all the right settings are for rendering but we are getting there! It is now 4pm and we almost have a full scene rendered which beats a week of straight rendering and having one scene close to being fully complete. I think this was a step in the right direction, and we are all feeling very optimistic about these renders :)