Starting to render

          Although it's easter break, I have spent the last week running from computer to computer, setting up shots to render. At this stage I am still unsure whether the project will get finished on time, however I think the rendered shots are looking very nice, and that's without any form of ambient occlusion!

    

These are obviously draft renders (you can notice the lack of textures on some bits of the elektro primer).

The good thing is that most of the shots were easy to separate by foreground, middle ground and background. Some shots like the one I am about to explain below were an absolute nightmare to separate.

 Shot 6:

This was the first shot that I started rendering. I left the shot to render over the weekend (the studios are closed then) so that they would be done by Monday. It turns out that the shot still had 82 hours left on Tuesday afternoon. When I say I let the shot render I mean I just let it render with everything in the scene because I thought that 2 days would be plenty of time for it to be rendered. Without having a proper idea of how the shot would look rendered I set out rendering things by layers and this is how it went down:

 Background

Crystals

Workbench

 







Character "LL019"

Now because the character and the workbench were rendered separately from each other as well as the floor, I had to render them both together in order to JUST extract the shadows which I would later composite:

This:

in order to get this:

Last and by far the most important bit, was the foreground:

At this stage I was getting a lot of flicker in the render (I will go into this momentarily) and one of the things which was affected quite badly by this was the terminal machine, or at least parts of it so these I had to render out separately:

So after all that here is what the composited shot looked like:

The main problem which was avoided by doing this was render time and flickering. However what was actually wrong wiht the render was my stupidity. I had set the renderer to project FG points along the camera path. This changes the settings on the renderer so that it reuses final gather as well as geometry information. So instead of reducing the possibility of FG Flicker happening, I just made everything flicker. Also the crystals are floating because they are actually floating geometry which goes through the floor meaning that they had to be rendered together with the floor.

Separating shots into layers as I have is very helpful although I will definitely have to look much more into state sets so I can do this much quicker. Overall instead of taking 8 days to render (as it was estimated by 3DS) this shot only took a couple of hours.