The Final Film

 

Music: Spirit Blossom 

Musician: Roman Belov 

URL: https://pixabay.com/music/-spirit-blossom-15285

Changes From Concept To Completion

During the modelling, texturing and scene assemble stage of the project I changed or removed quite a few things that I had initially planned on doing or including in the scene all the way back as far as storyboarding. This is a short list of some of the things that were either changed or removed from the finished film - as well as a brief explanation as to why that change was made,

• Wallpaper Design - Changed from stars to clouds
• This was done because when I started creating the star design I realised how much time it was going to take and scrapped it for clouds as they could take up bigger spaces on the wall and I wouldn't need quite as many of them
• Dresser Design - Changed from open to closed
• This was purely a time saving measure as having the drawer closed meant I needed to do less animation as the scene no longer involved the ball bouncing off the edge of the drawer on the way down to the ground and instead just rolled directly down to the ground and only bounced when it got there
• Wall Art - Changed from Toy Story inspired images to my own character concept art
• Again this was done to save time that I could then dedicate to working on the animation as I wanted to give myself as much time as possible to do that as I could in case any unforeseen issues popped up along the way
• Putting fewer unique objects on the shelves
• Originally I had planned to put unique objects on each of the shelves in the scene but when I started running into issues where the scene would crash frequently or the controls would be delayed in responding to my prompts I decided to cut that idea and instead just copy and rotate what was already there to make it look like something different - even though it's the same set of books just rotated and recoloured a few different ways
• Putting less furniture in the room
• My initial concept designs included a chair at the desk, a beanbag chair in one of the corners and a cardboard box on the floor by the desk. I even started modelling a globe to go on the dresser before I decided to cut all of this stuff in order to save time and space on my computer as I had gotten to a point where the Maya file would take over 20 minutes to open any time I wanted to work on it. So, I went through everything in the room and removed anything that I could where I believed its absence would not affect the scene overall.
• Cutting a character
• One of the more difficult changes I made was to cut the very first character I had created for the film. I had to do this because for some reason, any time I tried to add it to the final scene Maya would crash either as it was importing it or shortly after it had finished importing. So, after spending about a week on it I decided the best use of my time and in the interest of not corrupting the full master file, that I would cut that character out and revisit it in my own time to try and determine the cause.
• Changing some of the animation
• A change I made from the storyboard to final film was to cut some of the animation that would have taken place between Scene 7 and 8. According to the storyboard my Pokebot character was going to circle my name after he fixed the letter placement but after realising that by including that animation I could be looking at somewhere close to 900 frames I decided to modify his animation to include one initial loop, including fixing my name, stopping to inspect his work and then zooming back under the bed. This would not only save me time during the animation process but also at the rendering stage too as it would mean I wouldn't have as much to render overall.

As mentioned before, this is not an exhaustive list changes I made but I felt it would be a good idea to show how my thoughts and creative idea making process changed as I delved further and further into the project.

Rendering and Editing The Film

 

A still from Scene Five featuring my Pokebot character

After a lot of issues along the way, it's finally time to render my final film. Over the past week or so I had attempted to do some test renders on each of the scenes in the final film to see how long it would take for my laptop to complete.

This is where I ran into an issue - after running for over 90 minutes, my laptop still hadn't completed rendering a single frame - in fact it was only on 8%. It was then that I messaged some of the people in my class to ask them if they had any suggestions for improving render times as there was no way I'd get anything dome otherwise. 

That's when someone suggested using a render farm and even recommended a few that I could try. After looking into the options I settled on Fox Render Farm and the speed that I was able to get things rendered was like night and day. I couldn't render a single frame in 90+ minutes and the render farm managed to render Scene 1 - which is 200 frames - in a little over 6 minutes.

After checking through each of the 200 images in Scene 1 and seeing that there were no issues, I pressed ahead and set up and submitted each scene to be rendered. Rendering with this render farm was really convenient in that I would point the software to where the Maya scene I wanted rendered was, and then it would analyse it and read all of the asset and texture files using the project settings related to that scene. As for defining the actual render settings - it worked the same way - I would set the render settings in Maya as I would normally do if I was rendering it on my machine and the software would read those settings and apply it to the render job,

A still from Scene Three

All in - I would estimate that the rendering process for all 8 scenes took about 2 hours using the render farm - which consisted of 748 frames, something I definitely wouldn't have been able to do using my own laptop.

Now, with all the scenes rendered it was time to take all the image sequences I had gathered and turn them into a video. In class it was recommended that we use DaVinci Resolve for this as it's free and professional grade software. However, given the extremely limited space on my laptop I had to find an alternative option. After a lot of research I chose Shutter Encoder. It has an extremely basic interface but it is relatively straightforward to use. To make the video using my images sequences I did the following;

Add all the images to the queue on the left

Set function to h.264 or AVI or any output you want

Under 'Bitrates adjustment:'

• Set 'Scale' to 1920x1080 (or any other resolution you want)

• Click 'VBR' until it says 'CQ'

• Set the CQ value to 21

• Enable 'Max quality'

Under 'Image sequence:'

• Enable 'activate the image sequence to 24fps'

Under 'Advanced features:'

• Set 'Force tune' to 'stillimage'

Start function

 Once I started the rendering process on the video it took about five minutes to complete. I rendered out the video in both MP4 and AVI. I chose to do that because AVI is the format required for assignment submission and MP4 because if I ever decide to add this to my portfolio, MP4 is a more widely used format across different operating systems and video playing software.

With the render now complete I brought it into YouCut on my phone to be able to edit it on the go. As part of the editing process I cut out some of the awkward scene cuts to try and make it look a bit more cohesive and add some music in the background.

Overall, I'm very happy with how the film turned out.