We spent our most recent meeting putting the boiler pump together, and then placed it into the environment. We also placed a camera into the scene, which moves around to give the viewer a better view of the envoronment, and most importantly the boiler pump as a whole.
Because I've been using the most recent version of 3DS Max, and since my middle part of the boiler pump (and presumably the materials too) will not open in earlier versions of the program, I was tasked with rendering the final video.
Before doing so, a number of changes had to be made, not only to shorten the total render time as much as possible, but also because of other technical issues. The aforementioned changes are as follows, with screengrabs.
Firstly, Adam's water tank was removed from the scene:
This was a difficult decision for me to make, since I imagine that along with the environment, Adam spent a fair bit of time getting the tank to look just right, and it fit in with the scene very well. However, once the completed boiler pump was placed into the scene, we initially had difficulty getting it to fit next to where this boiler was placed. It was shrunk, and even moved to the other side of the room, but I later noticed that it got in the way of the camera, so it ultimately had to be hidden. I personally feel that, had we thought more about it, we probably could have found a way for the water tank to connect to and work with the boiler pump.
Secondly, I had to replace Ryan's fire with one of my own.
The flame does look very good, but a problem that Ryan discovered early on was that, when a light source is included in the scene with this fire, it for some reasons colours some of it blue. While blue is the inverted colour of yellow, we had been scratching our heads as to why the flame was even changing to that colour, or rather how or why the light was changing it. With no apparent answer or a way to solve this, my only option (with it being 2am at the time... I just wanted to get the render started and go to bed!) was to replace the flame with one that I made and used for an earlier assignment:
So after bringing in this flame from a 3D Modelling and Animation assignment from last year, I placed it into Ryan's model, resized it as neccesary, and this is how it looks:
It is a bit of a shame that I had to resort to this, because my flame is actually dimmer than Ryan's, and the reflection effect that the previous flame had has now been lost.
Finally, a bump map that Adam applied to the concrete floor had to be removed.
Bump maps take a fair bit of time to render, so with the floor basically being a giant bump map, that would have been one of the contributing factors to a very, very long rendering time. So I simply had to make one small adjustment to the material to get rid of the bump map...
And this is what it now looks like. You can still see that there appears to be some bumps in the floor, so while it now doesn't have a very realistic texture, it still doesn't look too bad, and again reduces rendering time.
So while applying these changes, as well as making minor adjustments to the lighting and shading, I managed to get the total rendering time from 25 hours, up to around 36, and then finally down to a more reasonable 19 hours. I still didn't think my laptop could handle all of that, so I had to do it in four parts, three of which I slept through. The final render, in video form and with all four parts included, is here:
In our next, and most likely final meeting before we present it to the museum staff, we will be making some more changes like possibly adding a voiceover.
No comments:
Post a Comment