Frame 163

Just checked: the render is now at frame 163 out of 192. For some reason what should be the easy frames take way longer that the complex ones. I think I have a fix, but I am letting the current render run for another day. Total render time will by then be four days. Resulting screen time: 8 seconds. At this pace I will surely finish the animation by the Dutch holiday "Sint Juttemis". Optimize I must! Yeah, yeah, I said that before.

Update : Finished today, hurray! Too bad I do not have the next scene ready to render yet. Close though.

Half res test

Tonight the test I am rendering will be at half resolution. Will probably still take quite a while since I now put four lights into the scene. The result will be dramatically different!

If this turns out well, my computer will have something to do for Memorial Day Weekend.

Update (the next morning): rendered in about five hours and actually looked rather good. Rendering full res at production quality right now!

Update #2: Oops, those frames were taking at least 45 minutes each. For the easy ones! Changed the sampling settings and brought the render times down to 15 minutes per frame. Could be done in two days now.

Head Modeler

Worked on modeling the head of the guy for >Hello World, amongst other things.

Not quite half res test render

There is so much stuff in Maya that you learn something new every day. You can test render at half resolution by selecting Rendering → Render → Test Resolution → 50% Settings. Real handy. So why does the batch render of the entire scene is still take more than 12 hours? The batch rendered at full res. Here is an image from last nights render (if you click on it you can see it bigger but scaled down to half res).

All progress is slow. But we should hit the next dimension in about a week.

Chair Model

With the semester over I should make some headway on my animation projects. Here is the current state of the model for the office chair that is to be used in one of them: >Hello World.