Almost Done

We finished rendering last night. We did all the rendering in a day, because we didn't have any fancy ray-tracing. We couldn't get it to work right and didn't have the time to learn how to do it right. Maybe if we didn't try for so long to get that annoying mental ray to work. Anyway it adds almost 60 to 100 times the render time by using ray-tracing. We will be editing it today. No it's not the most fancy but we kept to our production schedule.

I personal felt we had to settle with things, like the lighting and the texturing, in this project as we were learning as the project was being created. Hence, we didn't have the time to experiment with settings because everything was experimentation anyway. I would have preferred to have lectures to teach us how to do this things.

However after a lot of stress and long nights, I think we have a half-decent film. Hopefully, this will get us a good grade.

It has been an experience which I will most likely have to do again at many points in my life.

Rendering and current progress

We are actually rendering now. We had to settle on a lot of things, like some objects not being textured and only using basic depth map shadows, instead of fancy ray-tracing, to cut down on the render time. We split the project up into six scenes, the Opening map scene, the exterior scene with the bloke, the shocked scene, the picikle pick up scene, the door opening scene and the final interior camera pans scene. Scenes that have been rendered are the opening scene and the shocked scene. The exterior scene and the pickle pick up scene are currently rendering. The big scene is the interior camera pans scene, which will take a while. We cannot leave that to render as it has many different cameras in it. The curtains have unfortunately had to be deleted as something went wrong with them and they kept going through the walls. The shocked scene might need to be re-rendered as the lighting has been altered in other scenes. Here are some pictures from the currently rendered scene.

New Credit Sequences and Progress

I have edited the opening and ending credit sequences, making some
parts a bit slower. I have also added some music. For the ending
credits it's a mp3 I got from www.rareware.com called Ugga Bugga from
Conker: Live and Reloaded. The Opening Titles is the theme tune to
Doug. I just thought it fit.
Also here's a picture from one of the current scenes.
The Textures were finally finished last night. All that is left is to pllace the animations into the scenes and render. Yeah.

Current Progress and Conclusion

O.K, I would just like to take a few moments to write about the current progress of the project. The animations are all completed and have been saved as individual animations, some in clip format to the Public Folders. All early backgrounds and useless props have been removed from these files, so the new backgrounds can be placed in. Cameras have been figured out as well. Textures are mostly complete, some of the prop animations might need to be textured but that shouldn't take very long. I do believe that the outside of the building also needs to be textured. These will be ordinary planar maps as UV maps are proving to difficult.

On the rendering side, Harrison had decided he wanted to render in Mental Ray, because it makes the quality of the images better. Unfortunately, we had some problems with our reference files, and after many hours of trying to get Mental Ray to work, we eventually decided to give up on mental ray, and render it normally.

Unfortunately, Harrison only read tutorials on how to light in mental ray, so had to read some new tutorials.

Currently, my particular skills are not too useful at the moment. However on Monday, we should be able to place all the parts into one scene so we can tweak it here and there. Then we should be able to render it.

If all goes well, it should be completed by Friday, if we get a C I'll be happy.

New Opening Title and Ending Credits Sequence

I quickly did these credit sequences yesterday. I was going for a Monty Python like sequences. These are early drafts so can be altered.

Early Test Version of Film

Here is an early test version of the film. It of course needs to be lit and textured, some of the props need to be placed in and moved around. I think some of the cameras shots need to be cut down and the counter needs to be cut back so the bloke can be seen, but otherwise it gives a pretty good indication of the final film.

Composition Test

Here is an early test to see how we might go about composing the scene. It was done in Premiere with a background picture and the map scene on top. The effect is o.k., but I afraid that it might look a little bit composed.