I'm enrolled in a Maya modeling and animation course, the first of two. For our finals, we are creating 5-minute short films. Well, last night I started rendering a 1000-frame scene. I come in to check on it this morning. It is at frame 328. Fine, Maya renders slowly, that's ok. I preview some of the frames and the animation.

THE HAIR ON MY CHARACTERS WAS COMPLETELY WHITE! It shouldn't have been. Well, I was furious. Turns out PaintEffects hair hates lightfog. So I've got it re-rendering. It won't be done until tomorrow.

It makes me really mad that I can't predict what Maya will do to mess with my scene. I mean, it takes so long to render anything that I can't really do preview renders all the time. All I can really do is see how it appears in the OpenGL window, and it appeared fine there. Everything seemed to be rendering fine earlier. I added a light fog light to simulate the effect of light underwater, animated my character swimming underwater, and started rendering. When I checked, it turned out wrong and I had to scrap all the rendered frames. Arrgghh.

I really wish I could've done this in Blender. At least there I know how things interact and the scanline renderer is excellent for previews.

Sorry, just had to rant.

If our Exemplar (x-class, 32 node) was up right now, Id offer you the use of it...

You'd rather use Blender than Maya?

For some things,yes. I appreciate Blender's speed. Of course it has nowhere near the features that Maya has, and I probably couldn't have made the movie without some of the shortcuts Maya offers, but it can still be frustrating at times.

Once a Blenderhead always a Blenderhead I suppose.

You should post your movie when it's done

Seconded

By the sound of things, DNF'll be out sooner...

No, it's due Friday. It'll be done. Movie is going to be put on a DVD. Maybe I'll put up a torrent or something. It'll likely be a fairly large download.

Set the detail of the render down then... I mean, that's rediculous. I've seen some extreme projects that don't take THAT long.

(Also, you could find some people with computers running to get a rendering farm going :D)

Maya sucks... That's just my little opinion though...

Anyway, over at our school, if you're rendering, since we have a massive network, you have about 18 high speed machines doing your rendering at the same time... Ergo... it's done in about 30 minutes... max..

Whenever I render a movie, I always render it in scenes (if it's possible)

So you render the first section, then once you see that it is good you go on and make/animate/render the next bit.

Bits could be between 10 seconds, or even 30 seconds. It takes a bit longer rendertime wise, but you're much more productive and if there are any problems, you'll catch them sooner and don't have to rerender 12 hours worth of stuff.

Why do you think that? Maya is friggin godlike...

I <3 Maya

Yeah, this is a 35-second scene. We run at NTSC, hence 1100 frames takes about 37 seconds. (I know I said 1000, but it's actually 1100) The other guys in my group are rendering their scenes too.

We have a whole Linux lab to work in, but the computing isn't distributed. We can only use one machine to render. Probably because it's the only Linux lab on campus and the grad students need it for their projects too.

Just curious but are you rendering it on more than one computer? It's better that you do because having just one computer do it all is WAY too time consuming. Try to get ten computers together and have each render 100 frames of the animation and then compile all of them using "after effects" or a similar program. Also, when you render you movies, you are making sure to test each of the different shaders and such in the film by just render out that particular effect by itself, are you? You can seperate each different object in the movie to its own render layer and do test renders of that object alone. Maya will automatically clip out parts of the object if its overlapped so if you want to do full renders of each object seperately, you can then use "after effects" to layer the seperates renders into one movie.

I.E. If you have a movie of a ball bouncing through a ring of fire, render out the ball by itself as one movie, render the ring by itself, and render the fire particles on the ring by itself and then overlapped the movies together into "after effects" as one movie. Ideally, you use a computer to render each object to speed up render times.

Using that method destroys all lighting, and since video editing programs have a hell of a time dealing with partial transparencies, things on the edges of the flames and such will look out of whack.

That is all assuming you actually have a blue or green background on the video so you can mask the object itself out.

...you can render just one frame?

Dunno how that applies, but ... yeah.... You can with nearly anything.

...and many, many professional companies disagree with you on that one.

Its been over a year since I last saw the method put to use but I believe that Maya already creates the mask for you because it'll render frames with an alpha channel added in.

...so that you don't have to render the entire movie before realizing something went wrong? Why is he complaining about Maya if he could have previewed what the render was going to look like?

Allow me to rephrase. Maya sucks for modeling. Maya is pretty good for rendering.

I did preview it. It looked alright. I then turned on lightfog (the way I had it set up, it would've taken forever to preview, at least 10-20 minutes) and ran Render from the command line, reniced it to run in the background, and went home to sleep. You have to understand, I was in there for 8 hours already that day.

Oh well, going back today to see if it's done yet. That is, after my final that starts in 30 minutes.

8 hours? thats it? pfft, I've been at school for alot more then 8 hours rendering stuff with Maya.

It's real ***** sometimes... I had a perfect scene and was rendering it out, lighting was great in my test renders, turned on motion blur and came back 4 hours later... the thing was completly black... I'm still not sure what happened, but May didn't like the way i set the lights up and motion blurs. So I turned off motion blur and the lighting worked fine... three hours later, then i just added the motion blur in Shake.