Archive for April, 2007
I’ve briefly mentioned that I am working on a new short. Don’t worry, I’m not getting myself into another 2 year project. The idea is to do something quick and simple. I’ve already gotten a good way through the modeling/rigging of one of the characters. After I finish (hopefully by Friday), I’ll make minor alterations in color and shape to have a second and third character. After that is done, I’ll start laying out and animating the piece. I hope to do the layout, animation, lighting, and rendering in less than two weeks.
Two weeks? Yeah, it isn’t going to be the most glorious looking thing in the world. The purpose is to spit something out quick. In fact, the lighting will be basic, the props will be minimal, and the animation will not be finished (step-key baby!). I have a higher-purpose/reason for doing this short, but I don’t want to share all my secrets just yet. :)
If those two weeks start expanding into something much longer, I’ll cut myself off and run away — very fast!
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After the release of a few more processors, the remote rendering could actually be finished. Well, actually, all of the files I had que’d up have been executed. It’s just a matter if I have anything else I can send through the Render Rocket system. Sometime in the next week or two, I’ll need to go pay them a visit or ship a hard drive to collect those image files. I have the option to download them, but that would be a huge amount of data to send over the internet (1920×820 by 16bit). An external hard drive transfer makes much more sense.
All in all, I pushed 40 something shots through their computers. It finished up really quickly. Gotta love that. I’m still rendering here on my setup and could be for quite a while longer. There are some files that would of been difficult or not possible to render remotely because of their reliance on Maya fur.
Tomorrow, I’ll look through the remaining 6 shots that need to be rendered and see if I can slice them up in a way that at least some of the non-fur portions can be done at RR. That would alleviate some of the pressure here and speed things along. We’ll see.
There is still quite a bit of rendering to do and since I can only go so fast — it is a waiting game. My local machines are moving 24 hours a day. The processors I currently have available at RenderRocket (currently able to use 12 procs, hopefully more on the way) are still chugging away around the clock too.
My job has been simply to watch renders and make sure things are going as smoothly as possible. Keeping track of all the shots/layers is a little complicated. As noted in previous posts (on the old PLOG, link on right side), I have some software I wrote that keeps track of everything for me. If you are interested in seeing where I am as of this morning, you can click the link below for a frame grab of the latest output.
Outside of this, I’ve started working on another project when I’m not busy babysitting the renders. I mentioned it briefly a couple of weeks ago. I’ll post more about it as I get further along.
