PANIC MODE! WOO HOO!

I'm actually in quite a good mood despite the fact that I have about 2 weeks to finish thesis when I really should have another year. What can I say, I attempted a really really ambitious project. Renders are coming along fine, I've rendered out 3 shots, and 2 more are going overnight. I'm aiming for getting 4 shots finalized per day (the 3D work), which will leave me about 4 days for compositing. Not enough, of course, but it should be adequate to get something passable together.

I'm going through a marathon of effects: the splash, the fire, and the underwater shot all have new renders. The mrBatchAnim.mel script is saving my ass all over the place, and I've gotten pretty good at dealing with memory heavy renders. One of the best tricks, besides using the command line whenever possible, is to end the explorer.exe process while it's rendering. I find for some reason that will prevent most of the following:

-fatal error, cannot allocate 23493409583094 bytes of memory
-mental ray memory allocation error, memory exception thrown
-memory usage has exceeded allocated amount, memory exception thrown
-the C++ runtime library has caused Maya to terminate in an unconventional way
-memory allocation error, mental ray may have become unstable, please restart Maya.

I've been working at home a lot, now. Gone are the days where I can come home and relax. Now I finish my day's work and come home to start my night's work. I render overnight at the labs, during my day at the labs, at night at home while I sleep, and during the morning just before I leave the house. That's actually more than enough rendering power.

The really really big problem is that ALL THE FRICKIN MONITORS ARE DIFFERENT. My Macbook at home is the absolute worst--any render that looks perfect there looks extremely dark on any other monitor. My old Fujitsu lifebook has no graphics card as far as I know, so the color depth is about 20 colors. Or that's what it seems like. A nice-looking render on my Mac, when viewed on the lifebook, you can count the colors on the screen. Three shades of brown! Two shades of green! One shade of blue! And black!

I am seriously oscillating back and forth between feeling like I have more than enough time to finish and feeling like there's no hope for passing. These mood swing correlates very strongly with an effects shot looking decent and an effects shot looking like crap.

Some problems I solved this week so far: translucency for the dragon, putting the moon in the sky without a weird alpha fringe, getting a workable dragon splash effect, getting a first composite for the fire, and doing a first attempt at compositing in the ambient occlusion and depth passes. The depth pass is most troublesome because the depth fog tends to make everything flat. My plan right now is to make 4 AFX comps, one for beauty, one for depth, one for ambient occlusion, and one for additional special effects. I'll take all those comps and layer them on top of each other. Just to simplify things, hopefully.

I like talking to Adam Burr about my project. He always seems so optimistic about a project without sugar coating things. He tells me what's working and what looks bad, and yet I don't come away feeling like I just got beat up. Being in that dynamics class is kind of intimidating because many of students in the class right after me are absolutely phenomenal artistically and technically. I think CADA has peaked with that class.

Keeping track of renders for 34 shots is not fun. My system of swapping files into folders called currentBeauty04, currentAmbOcc06, currentDepth23, etc., is working pretty nicely. It's still a lot of image sequences, however, and sometimes I can't find an image sequence that I'm sure I rendered sometime somewhere.

Today was decent, in terms of getting work done. I really have to be a machine from now to the end of the semester. Tomorrow, I'll get four more shots rendered, work on the ripple effects, start working with Realflow one way or another, and do a second pass of the fire effect. If Conrad has my page-turning animation, that will work out well because those can be the four shots I render.

Okay, it's 1 am = time to do an effect then choose a shot to render.