Day 69

Today, when I came in my files are still rendering. And out of a sudden all my renders started crashing on the farm. The error log wasn't really that helpful also.

I then went into the render of my first shot. There were a couple of missing frames( like around 10plus) I went into my scene and re-render each of them individually. In the end, I managed to get it to finish and I have a complete sequence of shot one. Phew.

Now to shot 2, the renders on the farm screwed up quite bad. But luckily I foreseen a problem like this and as a backup, I rendered my entire shot 2 locally as well. The renders locally were perfect. Not a single missing frame. Next up, the dust. The dust was the most problematic of all. Initially when I rendered my dust, I brought it into Houdini COPS as a test frame. I realised that there wasn't enough dust and therefore I increased the particle birth rate. However, when I brought the render with more dust into Nuke, it looks totally screwed up.

It looks like this after I did an over with the terrain render.

The dust render with more dust:



The dust render with less dust:




God knows why is it like that. Hence, I went back to my first dust simulation file and re-started from there. I also tweaked a little of the lighting as it was too dark in the latest render. I realised that I couldn't use back the same lighting system that I used to light the terrain. I did some re-tweaking and I am good to go. The render with the less dust is the render which the lighting was also fixed.

I re-rendered the dust for both shots on the farm and it was super fast.

While I was at it, I started compositing in Nuke for the first time. I started compositing for the first shot. At first I had trouble separating the passes and stuffs like that but after consulting Zack about it, it became all clearer. I also managed to apply Zdepth to my render with Zack's help and also his help file. I also placed a background at the back of my render. I also added camera shake. Below is a single frame of how it looks,



Zack saw this render and told me that my background shouldn't be shaking too much as it is much much further away from the field of view. He also told me if I had time I should do some blending of the image with the terrain render.

I also started archiving my file.