Rendering Dailies
February 17th, 2010Throughout the production process, our animation team continually refines the character animation. At this point -many months into the process- we are focusing on subtle animation tweaks. But, for each small change, we need to re-render the shot for evaluation. These shots have a lot of detail, and at moderate render quality, they take nearly 6 minutes per frame. Multiply that by 24 (frames per second) and we are looking at about 2 1/2 hours of rendering time for just 1 second of animation!
This prolonged rendering time was really starting to cause a lag in getting feedback to our animators. To avoid this bottleneck, we’ve now built a simplified, grayscale layer into the maya project for each animation chunk. Now, when we need to get a quick look at the animation, we simply render this “cheap” preview-quality animation layer!
See below for a look at what I’m talking about.We were able to quickly preview this shot and catch an issue with the arm animation without wasting many hours, rendering at a higher quality.
