ANI210 - Week 06 & 07

Oh I wish somebody would read this stuff.

The last two weeks have been hell trying to work on the bunker scene. This thing has caused me so many problems, it's not funny.

A quick run down, because I don't want to be here all day:

I chose Shot number 2, that's the one where the pillbox sits atop a hill.

The first thing I had to do, was YouTube Artillery shell impacts in slow motion.

I basically looped the explosion on repeat and used that as a reference for creating the first headache: fire.

Using Water, to make Fire. Now that's a new one. Trying to understand just how all this worked was very VERY time consuming. But because of my diligence, by Week 7's class, I was able to give most of the guys in the room a tutorial on how to create the effect. Because I had spent about 8 hours on it myself, I was basically a pro. ;)

The next thing I had to do, was understand how I'd make the pillbox 'explode'.

There were a couple of ideas floating aroudn the classroom, such as scaling a sphere down and hiding it inside the bunker, then animate it very quickly sot hat it'd expand and push the mesh outwards. But I didn't like this idea, I felt it was too make-shift. So I researched and came across Bullet.

Bullet worked really well initially. In that I create a solver and a rigid set and they collide then BLAM> Explosion.

Here are some rendered shots of the explosion and the rubble.

That mushroom cloud!!

Ok, this is where things started to go wrong (albeit they had been up until this point anyway). I was paying too much attention to how things looked like inside the renderer within Maya - because up until now, I was lead to believe, that what it renders like in Maya, will be what the frames look like once they're batch rendered. WRONG.

But we'll get to that.

I decided that ot make my explosion look more believeable, I had to replicate more effects - as Jody says, go further! So I did, I thought that by adding another emitter, I could create dust and smoke.

Not enough smoke...so I played with the attributes.

Perfect!

Right so here's where I've spent the last 20 hours. Yes, by the time I'm done with this blog, it will have been even longer.

Basically, rendering this thing is a nightmare. Just to get these frames, will take upwards of a few minutes, and that's not even the final batch render.

But as I said before - I assumed that if things rendered like these images inside Maya using MentalRay, then SURELY THEY WILL LOOK THE SAME ONCE I BATCH RENDER.

WRONG.

WRONG.

WRONG>

Oh wait, before we get to that, let's discuss some issue surround Bullet FX.

You see, it's not as simple as just spending 3.5 hours learning how Bullet works and implementing it into your scene. What they never tell you is that once your scene is finished, you can't simply render out Bullet. It doesn't work that way. No instead, you need to sink about 6 hours into finding out WHY your bullet FX won't render.

I'll save you the loss of a day and tell you - Bullet needs to be exported as an Alembic file first. And to do that, is quite a convoluted process. You need to export those frames, then re import then after they render and the animation data is saved, then re apply their channel attributes and delete the original bullet nodes. BUT MAKE SURE YOU SAVE A NEW FILE! Because otherwise, you've just deleted your solver original and if you wanna go back, well you can't.

Right so I rendered for 2 nights and a Day straight. I'm not joking.

The first night I set the scene to render, I woke up to find that it hadn't progressed from the last frame I saw when i went to sleep. I couldn't understand why, so I left my scene to render again at school the next day. That night, because I knew how terrible Maya can be, I also rendered again at home overnight. When I woke up this morning, my computer AGAIN had failed to render all the keys, and so I took myself all the way to school (3 hour round trip, thank you very much) to grab the files from there. Guess, what? IT DIDN'T RENDER ALL THE FILES! At least this time I knew why, it turns out that when you render 240 frames, with a bunch of lighting, effects and at 1080P as per the brief, you need A LOT OF SPACE. And so my USB stick to which I was rendering too, was full up and so Maya had stopped rendering.

Seriously though, does SAE expect us to have $6,000 computers at home to do this kind of processing?

Anyway, Inside after effects, I experienced one problem after another.

Not the least of which being that everything BUT the Bunker, the chunks and the artillery shell, rendered with the lighting information.

Then there's this gem:

This happened every time I tried to import the frames for the shell or my smoke FX after I performed a re render. I didn't change any settings, everything that's been rendered has followed the same settings.

As far as that error message goes? Well google it yourself, you'll see that even on the official Adobe help page, their ability to solve this error is on par with Microsoft community (you might not get the humor int hat unless you've worked in IT).

So basically at this point, I'm rendering the entire Master Layer. Why? Because I rendered the above AE files but ofc they don't look anything like they were meant to.

I've spent so many days on this assignment, only to come undone by rendering problems and there in lies the biggest travesty. Each render takes HOURS.

"But Ryan! Why don't you just render one frame, and if it works then you know they all work! hur hur hur".

No. It doesn't work that way. Because I test rendered everything, all the time. Then I go ahead and batch render everything assuming that like my test frames, everything will be fine. Then I import the frames into AE and I get an error message like the one above.

Can you see how that's frustrating?

Probably not.

I'm literally out of time now though. As I work Friday-Sunday I don't have anymore time to invest into this one project. So I'll cancel the batch render on the master layer as it's taking upwards of 10 minutes to render a single frame and there's 240 of them. Also, history has shown that leaving my computer on to render doesn't work either (thanks for the increased electricity bills, SAE).