James and i came in university today for 9 o'clock to get a head start on the render farm as we know that it is going to be murder trying to get our piece rendered in the last few days. But we were having big problems, our piece would not even render the very first frame, and we could not work it out for ages. The qube broke down on my laptop after the third try so we hunted around for a desktop upstairs. With this repeating over and over, it started to get rather silly. We double checked all of the names of our textures and objects. A few hours had past and we still had not figured the problem. Kofi and Keith were kind enough to try and help us out and they did notice a few things wrong, but even this was still not enough.
Alex is sadly ill so we had no teacher to try and help us out until everyone started going to Jared for different things. After a while he set up some time for the people who needed his help and when our time came i was like, finally, we should be able to sort everything out now.
Jared said a number of things it could be that we might have to change. The first thing was the lighting, followed by making all of the textures smaller, then getting ride of objects. And if none of that worked by then then we would have to check every single line to see how many verts they have as they should only have two per line.
So the hunt begin, we started off with the textures first as we did not want to get rid of any lighting as it is very important to our scene. We begin with the textures instead, we found that many of them were not even in use so that was a start. The textures for the fountain and broken bridge were a big file which had to be changed, i cant actually remember the size but i do know that they were in serous need of being made smaller. With the textures sorted we tried a render frame on maya but it would crash the programme. James and i started looking into the side of each object and was disgusted by the size of the fountain! The fountain alone was taking half of the maya size. Having that off alone cut the size of the file by half which i thought must have been wrong. We figured that the broken boulders he had in the fountain was taking all of this space. We took away around five out of seven which helped greatly but it was still not enough. Next some of the detail of the power generator at the back was removed, and i took away a lot of the flowers. They were taking a hell of a lot of space, which i never even blinked an eye at. There were so many over one another that it actually took a while to sort it out.
To our delight we were finally able to render a still frame from maya which made my day!! After all them hours of slaving away, it paid off! I have learned so much i am quite shocked. I MUST remember to check all textures and sizes of everything before i ever render anything again. I knew that the file might be fairly big but not so big that even the render farm would not be able to handle the piece. I am so glad that we stayed a long time in university to work this out. Time really does pay off, and i would hate to think what we would do if we had left and tried to figure it out the next day. We all stayed in as a team (sadly apart from Yuki) to work out the problems.
Whilst James and i were handling all of that, Ryan and Michelle had started the credits, Ryan done the opening and Michelle focused on the ending. Ryan wants to add the sound effect of a type writer as we are called S.T.A.R.S which is related to Resident Evil, and they are well known for there type writer savings.
On another subject i have found some of the sound effects which we will be needing when composating everything together. I have found a creaky door and rat sound effects which was the one main sound we needed and were having problems with, but i have found a great website called www.sounddogs.com which has pretty much everything you need.
Here is what a quick render frame looks like and i am now looking forward to what the render will look like. We are doing this is layers though, so this may take a little longer.
I really love how the lighting has been set for our scene. We have the blues and purples we orginally wanted but thought that having a natural street lamp would work best to show how dark a cave normally is and having a coloured light would not look natural.
This is where the rat first appears on the bridge looking around. This is so that the audience gets a look to the most of the setting from the beginning.
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