Sunday, October 5, 2008

Animation Blues




This last month my computer has been real busy though I haven't spent all that much time on it. What I have been doing is rendering animation. I spend a relatively small amount of time setting up the scenes, adding characters, adding specific animations to the characters, positioning cameras, moving lights, etc, and then my computer renders the scene which takes a long, long time.

This has become somewhat frustrating, but, I did start using a new tool that makes it a little more easy to take. It is call Queue Manager and it is part of Poser Pro. I set up my scene and then send it to Queue Manager which takes care of scheduling and managing the rendering in a process independent of Poser Pro. That allows me to have a scene rendering an animation and still use Poser Pro to set up the next scene, work on an animation, etc.

I am doing a Halloween music video that uses my "Lady Dark Eyes" song I recorded a few years ago. I am also doing "The Making of Lady Dark Eyes" video to document the process. I created the first scene in the cemetery with six characters. Once again, I am having problems with missing textures on the characters. I have rendered it a couple of times and in both cases ended up with missing textures. This turns out to be very frustrating, as I only find out about it after it has finished the animation render which can take a couple of days. I am sure it has something to do with an overall lack of RAM, but, despite making changes to Virtual Memory and other tweaks, I am still having problems. I have put out desperate pleas on a few forums, but, so far not much help.

It appears that I may have to find ways to simplify my scenes which puts a bit of a creative damper on the whole effort. I have been reading of ways to simplify the scene that are not as obvious, such as, low rez characters in the background, simplifying characters by removing morphs you are not using, saving textures and reapplying them at lower resolutions, etc. I hate spending all the time and effort doing this as it is part of the creative process, but, I would rather find and apply "technical solutions", rather than, just make less complex scenes.

In any case, be sure to check out my You Tube site more often as I plan on releasing "dailies" just like a movie that show my little scenes as they are shot. It will be a few weeks before I have enough "footage in the can" (i.e. rendered scenes) to begin editing and creating the actual video.

Scenes rendered this month:
- Cemetery scene with six witches raising from the ground and flying away.
- Beach House Porch Scene where Witch walks up the stairs and passes a couple who are talking.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

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