22 March 2021
I have finished all my animation shots (shot 06, 07, 08a, 08b, 08c, 08d and 09). At this moment, our team was still struggling to get all the animated shots with visual effects rendered on the render farms without errors and crash.
Since the deadline is coming in the next 3 days, I’m thinking to compile everything we have so far from renders, playblasts, storyboard and sound into a complete video because at this moment we still don’t have anything concrete yet. In worst case scenario if the final render cannot be completed, we at least have something in a full proper video form for submission. I let Emma, Antoni and Ghera pushing the render jobs since they were already much more familiar with the errors that currently happening and render farm than me.
I gathered every latest playblasts and renders that we have from the shared OneDrive folder and university network. I then started doing a rough edit using Final Cut Pro. In this early version of editing, all of the Act 1 animation were technically there but with a mix of playblasts and broken render frames. We only managed to finish animation for Act 1 only, so for Act 02 and 03, I used drawing frames from the storyboards as animatic with motion to tell the scene. As more renders become available, I will keep updating the editing clip with the latest one.
Emma suddenly mentioned that she had a problem with her Shot05 where the character legs become wonky. I offered to look into her file and fix the problem so she can send the shot for render as soon as possible. After spending a bit of time, I finally found the problem in which she accidentally animated the bones instead of controller. While I’m at it, I created and animate a camera for the shot and send the file back to her.
We still had time to have some fun and laugh with each other in our Discord channel.
Later at night, Emma and I jumped into a quick session with Luke where he try to fix our problems with the render farm. And after numerous tries, Luke found out that Maya 2020 could be the culprit because the original animation shot created in Maya 2018 can be rendered without problem, but animation shots with added VFX that were created in Maya 2020 crashed on the render farm. Luke and Emma explain it to the other team member.
After the session with Luke, I asked Emma to stay in the voice call to discuss what options did we have to solve the problem. We finally decided that Emma will render all the shots without the VFX since they can be rendered without problem, while at the same time I will look into the problem and taking the turn to get it rendered with VFX. So if I failed at my render, at least we have all the normal shots rendered in time by Emma before the submission dateline.
I stopped doing the editing at this moment and since Emma was still logged in to the university network, I asked her to send all the latest animation files with VFX into our shared OneDrive folder. I started by checking shot 06 and 07 as soon as I received the files. There were several missing reference items created by Antoni and Ghera when I opened the file. So I keep asking Emma several times whenever I need another missing references.
I did several initial test renders and Maya did crashed several times. When I managed to get a render, I asked Antoni if I got the render look exactly like how they setup and some of them turned out different on my computer. After several tests I finally understand how they setup the HDRI and lighting references in the animation files.
23 March 2021
Since its already 2.00am in the morning and I didn’t have enough sleep for the last 2 days when pushing my animation shots, I proceed to let my computer doing the render for shot06 and see how it goes.
When I woke up, the computer was still rendering the shot about halfway done without crashing. I didn’t cancel the render to see how long it will take to finish. I took the opportunity to continue the video editing using my other computer at the same time.
The render finally completed, and it took about 7.5 hours to finish. So it can be rendered successfully without any crash and broken frames. The only problem now is the render time. I did some calculation and its impossible to render all the shots in time. So I went into the file again and doing some optimisation to the lightings, settings and anything that could make the render time faster while at the same time retain the visual to look as similar as possible to the original. I finally found the way and managed to render the same shot again within 2 hours compared to the previous 7.5 hours. I then make a new template for the lightings and settings to be used for other shots.
I spent the whole day for this and managed to render shot 03, 04, 05, 06 and 07 with fairly short time; about 2 hours for each shot. While the renders running, I continue doing the editing on my other computer and updating it each time a new render finished. Emma also has managed to render all the shots without VFX, so I put some of the shot into the editing.
24 March 2021
I sent the first version of the final video with all the current rendered shots to the team in the Discord channel. With the render possible now, Antoni, Ghere and Emma procceed to render the remaining shots which are shot 02, 08a, 08b, 08c, 08d and 09.