Digital Reflective Journal #9

This week I took a bit of a break as I waited for my animation to render. Before Monday I had conducted multiple tests renders every 5 second so that I could use the render times to work out rough averages on how long the total render will take. For this it came up to 4.5 days, which was extremely reasonable when considering the complexity of the scene. However, in order to achieve this, I had to redo Adam’s hair as whilst it wasn’t a problem for the far shots, for the close ups it became extremely intensive on the render time. I had always known that this might be a problem, however it was fairly inconvenient to find out at this stage. To fix it I circled back to one of the solutions I had for when the hair wasn’t working with the rig’s animation. This was replacing the hair simulation with hair cards which are basically planes with a hair and transparent texture on them. Luckily this process of converting the hair sim to hair cards was far easier than I had expected, with a YouTube tutorial pointing out a website with great free hair textures and me being able to simply convert the hair I had already done instead of starting from scratch.

Going into to Monday’s peer crit, I was eager for feedback on the new hair as whilst it looked passable, it had lost some of the detail of the other hair. Luckily, when I posed this question, I was told that they wouldn’t have noticed the difference if I hadn’t brought it up. This fact was reconfirmed when I re asked it in the games group feedback session on Thursday. Outside of this I also showed of the finalised animation through recording the screen capture on OBS. This received a lot of praise, however since the frame rate was so low it was hard to present the general flow of the animation without showing it at an earlier stage with a higher frame rate. The same thing happened during the games group feedback session. However, to add to this, everyone’s microphones weren’t working which meant that I had to communicate this through text. This made that session somewhat challenging however I was able to receive praise for my test renders and render time planning.

Outside of the feedback sessions, I spent a lot of this week taking a break whilst my project rendered. This was partially because I had burned myself out on Sunday in order to get my project at the stage where it was ready to render by Monday. The other reason for this was that whilst I had planned to start working on the game bible and end title sequence for my animation, I came into some problems. Firstly, was the fact that I couldn’t get Adobe programs like InDesign on my laptop as my student subscription was already set up on my PC. Secondly, and more importantly, was that I couldn’t run blender on my laptop whilst it was running on my PC. This was because it was connected to my steam account and would try to stream the blender on my PC whenever I ran it on my laptop. This led to a scary experience where I accidently streamed it on my laptop and closed in on my PC whilst it was rendering. Luckily, I had made sure to set the render up so it does each frame as separate images, meaning it could continue where it left of. Nether the less, all of this led me to only writing up the text part of my game bible on my lap top, and leaving the rest for when the render was done.

Once the render was done however, I came into two problems. The first one was that the changing frame rate whilst I was animating led to the whole animation being two fasts. The second problem, and the more annoying one, was that the animated fire lighting that I had set up didn’t loop its animation. This means that the fire is only flickering in the first section of the scene and remains static for the rest. Unfortunately, there is nothing that I can do to fix this, as re-rendering the animation would take too long. As for the speed, this can be fixed in editing. However, as it has a frame rate of 24 frames per second, slowing down the animation may lead to it becoming choppy. Another thing to consider is the fact that since I kept the sample size at default to keep down render time, there is a lot of noise in the scene. This isn’t wholly a problem as the noise can be reduced by a denoiser AI. However, this does lead to some artifacts which is why if I had more time to render, I would have definitely increased the sample size to improve the image quality.

Moving on from this, at this stage I have made and rendered the end title sequence and denoised the main animation. Whilst I am not completely sold on the end title sequence, the speed of which I was able to produce and render it means that I can easily change it if need be. At this stage all I have to do is edit my animation and format my game bible text in InDesign. After that, it will just be the finishing touches on my project as a whole.