Render Week - A Progress Update

I saw the light
Ok Monday began and I fell into the usual trap of tweaking for hours. I made extra statues for the foyer, changed textures, tweaked lights, changed bump depths until it reached about 2.00pm and I decided I preferred it how it was at the start of the day. I then came to the conclusion that there comes a point in a scene where less is better.
The simplistic style we have our hearts set on can so easily get overpowered by cluttered ornaments and realsitic textures, and I am trying too hard to improve what I now realise is already the finished article. I could spend probably another month tweaking the textures, models and lighting in my foyer to get it exactly how I want it, but at the end of the day there simply isn't time. It's wierd because I am totally happy with animation, which is what leads me to believe I am better at that, plus the fact I enjoy it way more! Anyway I have been told by Dave many times that I am a serious perfectionist, and so I decided to listen to him and "just leave it!"
Render Farm
So after realising it was just a case of rendering this week and not devoting more time on the to touching up I just cracked on with the render farm. I was a bit confused on how to use it at first and where my project should go, how to re assign textures, what settings to put in the submit box etc. However I seeked the help of others who had already experieced these problems with the farm and everything started to become clear. Team authentic had already battled it out with the farm a few days earlier and so Dan and Simon had alot of advice to give. I had to copy the project to vanguard, and set my batch rander settings up within the maya file. Textures did not have to be reassigned just simply placed in the texture folder of the project. Then all that was needed in the submit options is a name, frame number bracket, a scene and project directory, as well as a complete folder to send it to. Check which renderer your using, and the frame padding and submit!
The first test render I sent started to take a ridiculous amount of time to render - longer than if I had used my desktop and so I knew there was a problem. I went into the maya file and realised I had left all of my render layers on R - therefore it was basically rendering 5 times my 600 frames, all of which contained the character, dome etc. !!! I switched everything but master off the render and all was well.
My last problem was when I matched all the individual sequence layers up in after effects, they were not compositing properly, and overlapping etc. Plus I noticed missing objects and tiles etc. This was nothing to do with the render farm just me being dumb - I had not added all the objects in my scene to the layers, and had not divided the scene in 2 properly for the DOF. I quickly altered my mistakes in the maya file and rendered only what needed to be composited the rest I decided to just use master layer - why layer at times when its not needed? I dont know why I didn't in the 1st place.
Progress
So its now Tuesday night and I have successfully rendered out at least half of my foyer scene and imported the footage into premiere. I had a few problems today in which the render farm was spitting back batches with random frames missing i.e failing. This meant I had like 40 random frames missing in the middle of my animation and was causing a nasty flicker. I decided to redo the whole render rather than type in each individual frame number that was missing into the farm and then have to place them in the right order in the folder - LONG. It worked fine the 2nd time, and all i did different was just render one layer at a time rather than setting all layers to R. I am still slightly unhappy with the brightness of the foyer looking at the final renders now, and the lack of depth on the walls is a bit of an eye sore, as well as this the domes texture is hard to see with the ..... wait no I have to stop this - its fine, its just the perfectionist coming out again. I will leave it!
Tommorow I hope to finish all rendering and begin editing, importing sound, playing with DOF, and titles. Only 3 more days to go, the earlier rendering is out the way the better, everyones going to be using it now.
Dave's Issues
Sat with Dave today for a long time and helped him with a few problems with his mansion exterior scene. 1st we matched Mr Solly's music with his camera movements, so it moved in beat. Easily solved. 2nd problem was a long morning-lunch session. The front door in daves scene was not rendering with mental ray to look like the front door I rendered in maya software. They needed to be indentical to make the transition from one shot to the next smooth. For some reason even with the same gold texture on mental ray was spitting it out like a crusty poo bagel colour lol. Anyway we spent ages trying to change it to match my render and gave up as it just wasn't working. Then Dave had the ingenious idea of rendering just the door with maya software on a seperate layer, and therefore it should work!? We changed to software and it still looked poo, so we had to play with the blinn texture more, until I cracked it by typing in a specular roll off colour high than the maximum 1 the slider was allowing. 2 did the trick and we had a matching gold texture. Then it was a case of changing lights and adding the mansion to a seperate layer to the door etc. Altering shadows etc. etc. the list goes on. See his blog for more detail!
Anyway the last job was to sort out a background image which has been on our minds from day 1. I helped him import phils cloud designs onto 2D polygon planes which Nathan showed us how to create using the create path tool in photoshop. We then animated them to move slowly, and encased the whole scene in a sky blue dome rather than a flat 2D image which wasn't working. Then we added some simple overlapping green spheres to achieve distant hills, and whola! It looked simple yet effective. We stayed to like half 7 rendering his scene and attempting to composite the door and mansion but it failed miserably with the door gliding over the top of the mansion layer. However.... we know how to solve this.... and we will tommorow!