Ambient F*****G Occlusions!

As you can probably tell, it has not been a good day for me. It all started this morning when Jason showed me and kirill how to easily plug in an ambient occlusion shader to the existing shader of an object, it is a very simple and yet effective way of getting realistic lighting. I had a go, did some tests, (which are below, one is without the plug in and one with- you probably may tell by the subtle lighting in one), then after these tests i decided to have a go at it for the actual scene that i have come up with, and it worked, looked really nice, and immediately was transformed and i was blown away by it. However, rendering was a nightmare and from here on, i had loads of problems with the appauling amount of time that it took, even for a 640 x 480 size render! This was really confusing me, when after when i had unplugged the ambient occlusion shader it was still taking a very long time to render. I have fiddled with a lot of settings and was still having trouble, for a render size of 64x48, it took 40 seconds!!which is ridicules. I had found out later, that some how the mental ray data for the ambient occlusion was still taking an effect and couldnt find a way of stopping. I tried deleting all history, optimizing the scene size, then went into the hypershade and deleted all unused nodes and repeated nodes, then Chris suggested i deleted all unnecessary objects in the scene, via the Hypergraph and again was still taking a while.
After all these head traumas (upgraded from headaches), i decided to head for home and have another crack at the problem. I tried exporting ONLY the scenes objects and importing into a new scene, and low and behold, it renders quicker! The only reason why i didnt try this earlier was the fact that it was taking forever to render a single frame on a different scene altogether, so i just thought it may have been the network or a bug in the system. Just pleased that it is rendering stills much quicker and at 16 seconds- but only at preview quality tho.

getting there

well i have been spending time editing the main scene, and i am pretty happy with it, i feel the overall look is almost there. There is a slight more tweaking that needs doing obviously, like bump maps need to be altered and the contrast on some colours of the textures. something that Anna was mentioning to me last week was the similarity of the buildings and how it would be good to break up the irregularity of them, so i have done that as well, before i did the last textures on the factory. Need sleep now.

scene almost finished

well i have been working solidly for a couple of weeks on the main scene, and it is almost done. Meanwhile i have been researching the movements of a bag and how it moves through the air. I have actually seen few in leeds yesturday and had notied that they dont tumble much, they just more or less drift, which will save time for animating etc.

some videos for the previous blog post

dog run cycle test 1

Today i have been yet again refining my texture problem, i have solved it, as rendering does seem a lot quicker now for a still image, as ive reduced the resolution of the images, which does blur the image a small bit. I have fixed this problem, so all is going well. Meanwhile Kirill has been working very hard on the rigging and creation of the individual characters. He gave me a copy of the dog that he has just recently finished rigging, and i have just been having a go at a dog run cycle. Of course it is only a test at this stage, but i feel it is very highly accurate of the dogs movements of it legs. At this stage it does look a lot robotic, but this is the result of some filmed footage of my dog running up and down my garden chasing a toy. So i have done my research.

feeling terrible but must blog!!

Yeah not bee so good today but i still intend to try and do some work at home. Anyway, Anna showed me a good example of the very style which we are wanting to go for. It is an early video that Anna posted on moodle, i had just forgot about it.

Dynamo
Uploaded by biftoury

progress

Well today again i have been re-working the textures for the buildings as Anna pointed out to me the fact that the wooden door textures that i used in conjunction with the cardboard textures, that i needed to think about more the styalised approach that me and Kirill are still wanting to pursue. I had thought about this before, as i felt that it did need to re-work it. I am still working on other objects in the scene, as i need to get them to fit in with the other objects. However for now, i feel like i have just about finished the buildings texture. Oh and i checked that the bmp file was 59 mb!! so i had to make this smaller, just converted it to a jpeg, and its now 2mb.