Combining the Scene and Render Set Up.

Fahran started putting the scene together gradually, Fahran asked me if we should start putting the scene together and I thought it would be a good idea if we did it as we went along that way we can utilize the time that we have.

Upon reflection I don't think this benefited us massively, but it was one less task to do as the mountain, market floor and fountain were already imported. Whilst Fahran was doing this I was texturing the biggest building in the scene. On the other hand we did encounter problems with Maya on one of the desktop PCs in college. Everytime we tried opening the scene file Maya kept on displaying a fatal error and crashed on us. Fahran theorized that it was to do with the mountain having a high polycount (100,000) and a 4K texture. Mountain has now been reduced to- 80,000 and 2K texture. This has improved PC performance and the scene is running smoothly now.

Screen-shots of the building I textured to be added later.

After we had imported all our assets (all of us went away and textured the buildings in our environment. See previous blog entry) we put the scene together, placing the statues and various other assets in to place.

Kofi and Diogo worked on lighting. Fahran and I made suggestions.

I phoned Clym up to make it clear that we really wanted the flame dynamics to be sorted. Fortunately the flame dynamics worked smoothly, so the following day Clym sent us his flame dynamics through RapidShare.

Kofi and I in the end stayed in till 9pm thursday 25th Feb night and 7pm Friday 26th Feb night fine tuning the lighting and camera work. I feel that my practice with the graph editor really paid off because it made animating easy and efficient. This has also confirmed to me that I would like animation to be my profession.

Kofi and I left two batch renders over night on Thursday on two seperate PCs. Due to the fact that Kofi cannot open Maya on his account I logged in to this second PC. But only one batch render had worked. This puzzled both of us and a technical tutor. It then occurred to me that I was logged in to both this may been the reason why only one render worked.

Sunday 28th Feb.
I had phone calls with Fahran and Kofi going over what we need to do before rendering on Monday. We then put together this to-do list.

Monday 1st March.
This is our to-do list for today.

1-Review Lighting and Camera work- DONE- group are happy with this.

2-If necessary- convert textures to TIFF. This is because from reading Chris Caldow's blog, the Render-Farm only works if the textures are in TIFF format- we have yet to confirm this.

3-Assign assets to render layers- occlusion, colour, luminance and shadow.

4- Assign Lambert textures- DONE

Self Evaluation.
I feel that I have performed well as a group member and as a team player over these past two weeks. Ensuring that we get the necessary tasks done by coordinating our efforts so that we can be efficient. I have been a good team player because I have asked peoples opinions to see what they think so that everybody is happy. I think this is good because each group member has always made a suggestion that has been better than what I had thought of. I think I have contributed to maintaining group communication so that we are all up to speed with all that is going on.

Group evaluation.
We have performed really well as a group because we listen to each other and have re-assured each other that if they have any suggestions just say it. This has helped create a positive group culture where everybody's opinion is respected and is taken on board. We have also communicated with each other well either by phone, email or MSN- the result has been that nobody has had to play catch-up.