Fri- 2:00pm
Dylan has been able to render about 100 frames, meaning we still have 500 to go. There is no way that we can have the sequence finished today. Every frame takes between 5 and 15 minutes to render… and wont render at all on the uni computers. We’ve decided to leave it until Tuesday (Monday being a public holiday), any marks we loose will be worth it to hand in a completed assignment. Everyone who can may need to help with the rendering so we can have it finished by Tuesday.
-Alice
Thurs- 6:33pm
Test renders look good, but they are taking way too long to complete, every frame that has an ant in it takes over 6 minutes to render for some reason. Without any ants they are taking about 30 seconds.
Fri- 2:12am
Good news, it looks great! The assignment looks really good. Bad news, rendering.
I think the assignment deserves quality renders however we really are running out of time.
At 1280 x 720 with OSA (5) on along with shaodw, envmap and ray each frame on my pc is taking like between 8-11 minutes.
I cut down our fps to 20, so for a minimum of 30 seconds – 600 frames… We are probably going to need to split the rendering.
I will see how many my pc can do overnight and then panic in the morning if need be.
Fri- 3:40am
Just woke to check on the render, had done 6/600 frames at 100%, at an average of 10 mins a frame. At 50% its running at about 3-4.5 minutes per frame. I am just going to render it at 50% for now. Not really sure what to do…
I am sure sam will understand. – If anyone thinks 50% is the wrong way about doing this, please tell me as soon as possible.
- Current render settings. 50% 720 x 576, OSA on at 5, Shadow and Ray. Xparts 2, Yparts 2. jpeg quality 60 at 20 fps.
Fri- 11:21am
Over night i was able to render images 1-68 and 300-324
-Dylan (email correspondence)
All the elements are finished so now Dylan has the job of putting them all together and creating the fly-through.
However, we’ve run into some troubles with the ant. It seems that when you duplicate it, it breaks apart.
Because I animated the ant I’ve been trying to solve this problem.
I thought it could be that the position information from the original bones was effecting the new ant.
On the net I found a reverence to delta channels which are used when animating multiple objects, however this didn’t seem to be available when using armatures. I also tried to put the ants on different layers, but this didn’t seem to work either. I then grouped the ant with it’s armatures before duplicating it, and the ant held together as it should. I think the problem was that the armature wouldn’t duplicate when it had been left in pose mode.
The problem then was that all the ants moved in exactly the same way. A group of ants in nature would never walk in unison and it looked funny.
To solve this I reanimated two more ants, and transformed their IPO curves so that each walk cycle was slightly skewed. I’m hoping that three variations will be enough to make it look more natural.
This has left Dylan with limited time to put the piece together so we will have to be efficient with the rendering tomorrow. If we have different people rendering different sections at once then the render time will be much shorter
-Alice
Hey guys, was just wondering if you could all send me the textured models so i may bring it all together…..
if they are not too large, e-mail the files to benight@gmail.com
or just host them with a link, like the environment.
-Dylan
So this link contains the environment files and the textures, if you need them-im not sure.
be warned, its 50mb
Regards,
Mark
Hi Guys,
Here is an image of all the different type of leaves that i rendered, let me know if you’d like changes, or anything else for that matter since i haven’t done that much!
Hi all
Pls use the following link to download the .blend file containing the latest version of the environment. Not sure if blender requires the linked files, if it does let me know and I will upload them separately. I guess that the next stage is to combine all of our elements and start the animation process.
Let me know if there is anything else that I can help with.
http://www.wewillmultiply.com/Environment.zip
Mat
I realised translucency would increase render times, so I’ve left the ant in solid colour.
I’ve finished animating the walk cycle… what do you guys think?
I can make the legs lift off the ground as they step, but i though it would make the steps harder to match to the speed of the ant when putting it all together at the end.
If theres nothing that needs to be changed, I’ll email my blend file to Dylan by the end of the week because we need to get started on putting the scene together.
-Alice
I have attached some renders of the most recent version of the environment. I have been refining the layout which now includes the ants nest, trails and final textures. I have included an overcast sky, but any sky can be used. I have found this link which may be useful for future modeling. http://mpan3.homeip.net/earth
Mark if you have time, it would be great if you could model some leaves and sticks to sit on the ground.
If anyone has any changes or inclusions you would like me to make, please let me know.
Mat
