I think I’m FINALLY finished. Thought I should give an overview of how the project went.

Problem: Running out of time.
Ok I admit, I should have started working solidly from the beginning (JANUARY), rather than say… August.
Solution: START EARLIER.
Time was a huge factor and drawback which I have learned my lesson on.

Problem: Renders that didn’t match.
To save time, I started rendering bits and pieces before I had completely finished. Which meant when the rest was done, sometimes the new renders didn’t coincide with the old stuff, which was I’m-gonna-tear-my-hair-out-annoying when I had to rerender and find out what was different in the scene to the previous one.

Solution: Render all together or keep track of render layers.
Of course if time permits, I would have rendered it all in one go.  But I should have at least kept track of render layers and stopped making new ones that made it confusing.

Problem: Too many freaking files.
Solution: I’m not too sure there would be one.

Problem: MAYA.
Well…Yeah ’nuff said.

I might leave you with some stats of my animation:

1 song

4 minutes

6000 frames

4 computers worked simultaneously at one point

73,340 renders in 232 folders

100.2 GB of data

1 person in need of 1 serious break

Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to find something to do till I get tired at 4am. Hello, retarded body clock.

I have come to realised I really really hate fixing up renders, when there’s just the little things that are different. Spent the pass week fixing up little things. Oh-so-annoying little things.

Things like:

shadows that suddenly change in the scene because I unlinked a light and forgot to link it back when I had to render the rest of the scene,

little changes in the specular or diffuse or shadow, and it would take me hours to figure out what was different from the original to the newly rendered batch

particles that suddently stopped moving in a batch render (I had to rerender the end 20 frames one by one of leg particles because every subsequent frame after the first one would render exactly the same!)

the very last bit where the door opens: the door and the mannequin would not line up, too many hours it took to fix that

backgrounds that would suddenly move quicker than the objects, even when it is set to the RIGHT frame rate and I hadn’t changed the camera at all

so on and so forth…

The only thing that’s worse than a bad render, is rerendering said render more than once. BUT. IT’S. DONE.

I’ve been busy working on the graduate DVD the past couple of days… and on my birthday too.. awesome.

THINGS TO DO:

Animate last part of hallway

Particles - turn body parts to dust

Shaders - cracks

Goo - ooze, drip and when it comes “alive”

Paintings - eyes moving

Finally began the arduous task of animating… I made up a rouch estimate on the time frame to get it all done. It does not look pretty…

Animation by 26th September (4 weeks)

Problem Solved by 3rd October (1 week)

Rendering completed by 17th October (2 weeks)

Compositing done by 26th October

Due date for the DVD 28th October