wk 6: A few other things

For my Drew-drop scene instead of animating Drew falling down a hole with the camera falling to keep up, I decided I could recreate a falling effect with out have to move Drew much at at. What I did was to use the set from the mountain falling scene and cloned the edges to make it round. Then by making it skee-wiff it isn't the exact same shape so when it rotates at speed it looks like an actual cliff-face/rock-face. Then by making Drew flail his arms around wildy we have a falling effect. Finally to sweeten the deal I animated the materials to grow darker as Drewey falls ever closer to the ground.



To animate materials you select the desired material press 'n' or auto-key. A red box should appear around the material, Then clicking on the diffuse button and changing the colour (with the timeline in a new position). Now a red box appears round the diffuse button showing that it is animated. Now scrubbing over the timeline shows that angry old Drew is growing red!



It turns out Drew does have a mouth. I thought about animating just the moustache and the beard, but to show Drew's true ecstacy I thought it would be appropriate that he has a mouth that I could lip-sync. I turns out that creating and animating a mouth is quite easy. All I had to do was 'connect' vertices to create more edges and then drag the vertices below the mouth to a satisfactory shape. Then by turning animate on and moving the selected vertices I had a happy Drew! Alternatively I tried using dummies and FFD boxes but actually found vertex editing easiest when it cam to lip syncing.



Next the slow-mo shot! I went through various thought-trains to get to my final idea. Firstly I tried motion blur on the camera, but this pushed up the rendering times massively, and I mean massively, also it wasn't the effect I wanted. When it came to rendering instead of rendering one frame every teo minutes it had to make 12 passes of each frame, one pass taking two minutes making the whole rendering time HUGE!



After much thought I found a better way which was to cross reference Drew back into the same file and delay his key frames back 40 each time and then in object properties bring down the opacity and repeat the whole procedure 3 more times and voila a crazy slow-mo effect!

Whilst on the subject of rendering I had some initial problems along those lines, these being that if I was to render one 300frame file on my dual-core laptop it would take 70 hours... I think not. But on an 8 core Mac machine that is monstrously fast still takes 18-20 hours. So my solution since there is no rendering farm was to split each file up into 50-100 frame segments and log on to about 15 Macs and set them all rendering a chunk and then I can put it all together in premier pro. This was each computer only goes for aboput 2.30-3.30 hours! much better thanks to the power of 150 processors!
It turns out that backburner, the software responsible for rendering farms is installed but it won't let me configure it so I can't it use it! AAARRGggghhhgg! The long way it is acht!