So the second sequence of the film that I finished animating weeks ago finally finished rendering... here some notes...
It was 117 shots which in a RAW unedited form was 18 minutes and 45 seconds long...
Those shots took up 125gigs of space.... Two EXR sequences for each shot.... the RGBA and the Depth pass from Zblur
Out of those 117 shots there were errors with 14 of the shots... mostly all flickering texture issues probably because I had them set to alias or something... there was only one animation error, some weird ik glitch I didn't notice in the preview...
So when a sequence finished rendering... I backup and organize the renders and the project files... then I import the all into AE making folders for each shot and a folder to keep the error notes so I can come back later and fix them before I composite...
Also some of the "errors" are that I realized a few shots need artificial fill lights... I say "artificial" because all the environments are lit with on set lights... candles, torches or the moon and nothing else... and I made all the fire thangs flicker like real fire... So outdoors I always use the moon as fill... but indoors where there were no windows the candle flicker illumination can get annoying so I'll add an artificial fill so keep the focal point of the shot constantly lit...
It takes a little more than a half day to organize all the files/backup/ render out proxy mov's for the edit...
------
So now rendered I have about 24 minutes of the film.... the amount that is animated waiting to be rendered is probably another 10 minutes I'm guessing...
So i'm ahead of schedule which is good because I just got notified that I'll be speaking in Paris the first week of December so I'll miss about 5 days of work for that and I'll be out of the country for Xmas and New Years as well... BUT don't worry as I'm doing so much work that time off won't affect the release date ^ ^
It was 117 shots which in a RAW unedited form was 18 minutes and 45 seconds long...
Those shots took up 125gigs of space.... Two EXR sequences for each shot.... the RGBA and the Depth pass from Zblur
Out of those 117 shots there were errors with 14 of the shots... mostly all flickering texture issues probably because I had them set to alias or something... there was only one animation error, some weird ik glitch I didn't notice in the preview...
So when a sequence finished rendering... I backup and organize the renders and the project files... then I import the all into AE making folders for each shot and a folder to keep the error notes so I can come back later and fix them before I composite...
Also some of the "errors" are that I realized a few shots need artificial fill lights... I say "artificial" because all the environments are lit with on set lights... candles, torches or the moon and nothing else... and I made all the fire thangs flicker like real fire... So outdoors I always use the moon as fill... but indoors where there were no windows the candle flicker illumination can get annoying so I'll add an artificial fill so keep the focal point of the shot constantly lit...
It takes a little more than a half day to organize all the files/backup/ render out proxy mov's for the edit...
------
So now rendered I have about 24 minutes of the film.... the amount that is animated waiting to be rendered is probably another 10 minutes I'm guessing...
So i'm ahead of schedule which is good because I just got notified that I'll be speaking in Paris the first week of December so I'll miss about 5 days of work for that and I'll be out of the country for Xmas and New Years as well... BUT don't worry as I'm doing so much work that time off won't affect the release date ^ ^
Sweet time management! 24 minutes already?! Wow!
ReplyDeleteSo pleased to see you are making good progress. Your workflow is interesting to read about. So right that all of the early pre-production has saved you a lot of time.
ReplyDeleteAnd congrats on the Paris gig. Wonderful!
mdot, i know you already answeered that question at some point. how do you earn your living? you work all day and night on your movie, but somehow the rent and the food has to be paid fot?!
ReplyDeletethanx for answering,
freddy from germany
@ Frederic ^_^ Yes I've answered that question many times as it seems people dont know how cheap you can live when you have no car+ related expenses and no mobile phone + related expenses etc... I live a very bare bones existence that is very cheap so I am able to sustain myself based on the sales of "We are the Strange" and now a little money is coming in from youtube adsense... if you want to know more you can read my life story in this book http://www.amazon.com/Crowdsourcing-Power-Driving-Future-Business/dp/B002N2XFPK/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1258167133&sr=8-1-spell
ReplyDeleteHuh so that story was real! I stumbled across that book on google books actually! I didn't know if they were making it up or not..Sounded believable but I didn't know for sure..glad to hear it's legit!
ReplyDeleteSelf taught homeschooler turned Film maker huh?! Now there's something to write home about XD
Doing full frame renders eh? You can save a lot of time if you render in passes, especially if you have a static shot, just render 1 frame of the background, and then render the characters in their own layer. If you render oversize a bit to your final frame, you can add camera motion in after effects, plus any flickering light effects as well.
ReplyDeletePlus when something gets screwed up, you just re-render that character instead of having to do full frames again.
@nodelete
ReplyDeleteYeh that would probably be a smarter way to do it... I did that a lot for wats... in this one there's so much stuff going on in the 3d scene BG's I wouldn't be able to replicate it accurately in AE... I was researching using Trapcode horizon for that... render animation of ChaR and a single frame of the BG that you would drop in the BG in AE using horizon...then you could still spin the BG and move it and stuff too.