Playblasts

It was now time to playblast all my scenes after creating the animations. I will go through each scene to explain the encounters I faced with the animations. This gave me the chance to start working on secondary audio whilst I render a scene or two ready for submission. Being as though my intent was to create a believable and resolved animation that explores the directive abilities of myself and my ability to convey a story through appropriate techniques in the most efficient way, to have the whole thing rendered would not be feasible considering that it would take almost two months to render the animation if I were to render it solely on my own machine. (more about my own machine and how I shot myself in the foot later)  for submission due to time scale. But it will be rendered for the exhibition at the end, but obviously I won't be marked on that, but if I have two scenes that are rendered and the rest is a high quality playblast I can still convey the animations, it just won't look as pretty. But that wasn't my main aim, to create a prettily rendered animation. It was to convey a story through my directorship of a small team and my ability to portray emotion in my animations.

The reason I shot myself in the foot was how I did a good couple of weeks work on my own computer which was running Maya 2016, the latest instalment, whereas the computers at university were running Maya 2014. and because Maya binary files aren't backwards compatible all my work was useless on those machines. This also meant that render farming was useless. 

This has informed my practice in quite a subtle way but with up-most importance ... CHECK YOUR SOFTWARE AND SETTINGS ARE THE SAME IF YOU ARE USING MULTIPLE COMPUTERS!

In a professional context to give a bit of relevance to what I am saying and how render farming is the only way to spit out high quality renders in the most efficient way. the beautiful blockbuster film from James Cameron known as Avatar reportedly had:

Thirty four racks comprise the computing core, made of 32 machines each with 40,000 processors and 104 terabytes of memory. Weta systems administrator Paul Gunn said that heat exchange for their servers had to be enclosed

With each frame taking 2 days to render you can see why this is important.