So close, yet so far.

So I should be down one more nights rendering when I get home tonight, that is as long as I did not loose power at home today. Scene 1 is completing, scene 2 is done, Credit Animation is completed, and should just have Scene 3 and about 200 frames of character animation to render over night tonight. So lets get to the reason for this post.

Lessons Learned:

Lighting: WOW! Lighting is a big pain in the ass. Guess I just need more experience with it. I have had to re-render scene 2 like 3 times now because of lighting issues. There are still some issues with it, but I think I can live with them. The thing that really gets me is that I totally forgot that I wanted to add lightning to the engines, but oh well, I am not re-rendering all the ship scenes again. I could have done a lot better with more planning, but going into this I had no idea what I was doing, so next time I will be able to plan ahead and hopefully save myself some trouble.

Rendering: Take the time to do low res renders. I had so many issues creep up (A few I will fix in Post) that I wasted a lot of precious time. Live and learn. Another big pain in the ass has been the smooth proxy, I need to research it more because it is a hassle to smooth proxy the model and create the texture ref right before render.

Over all: I would have made a lot better time if I could reference in the models, lighting, etc because I found myself making changes along the way and having to go back into all 5 files and make these changes again was another time waster. I will learn to use references in Maya for any future multi scene projects.

That’s it for now. Hopefully I will be able to start putting in Sound tonight which should take another couple of days and I will finally be able to call this beast complete!