Re: is everyone happy the animations are sent?!
 

speaking of rendering...we took about a week to render ours....we used mental ray....and about 35+ of the school computers...which are brand new pentium d's with 2 gigs of ram....and then our big box we got this year...an 8 proccessor xeon compy.....the xeon blew the other comps away...but with all of those rendering...it still took about a week and a few re-renders....it was hectic

Re: is everyone happy the animations are sent?!
 

Ours was sadly late due to some goofing around in the middle of build season then a dead HD in one of our two computers. We had something going then, on the last day our rendering computer crashed in the middle and didn't make it.

For next year I am planning to get some computers together and build a render farm using everyone's laptops and my desktops(plus that dual xeon server that is sitting in the tech departments room, if I can convince them to let us have/use it)

Fortunately I have a few computers that have been setup to run at max load for 24/7 and are completely stable so we will have fewer crashing errors next year(hopefully)

Re: is everyone happy the animations are sent?!
 

I think it took about 7 hours for ours to render (i left it on over night lol) on my Dual P4 3.2 Ghz alienware laptop.

Re: is everyone happy the animations are sent?!
 

I love our animation...but because of server overload last-mnute, it finally said "Sent/recieved" at 6:03..(a little late)..our sound wouldn't upload right, nor could our intro or 'blank space"

Re: is everyone happy the animations are sent?!
 

The final scene to render took 18 hours(it was 7 seconds) and it messed up, this was on thursday, so we went with the scene and it was uploaded, but the mov is crap apparently

Re: is everyone happy the animations are sent?!
 

We tried to submit ours on the night before but our school network cut us off before it finished uploading. So we uploaded it around 2 o'clock the day of the deadline and it was finished uploading inside of 5 minutes. I was amazed as it took hours the night before and failed.

Our file ended up really fuzzy in the end even though we started with crystal clear source files, oh well.

Side Note: Did everyone upload their storyboards or did you forget?:confused:

Re: is everyone happy the animations are sent?!
 

WHAT WAS THAT?!?! I THOUGHT WE JUST HAD TO PUT IT ON OUR WEB SPACE :O

Re: is everyone happy the animations are sent?!
 

yea...we have our own data server that we maintain because when the district hosted it they ran out of room...hehe.....but we have a boot drive and then the data is on a raid-5 configuration.....we had one of those raid-5 hd's go down...and we bought a new one...but never realized that it would take up to 8 days to restore the raid array......everyone was mad at me, being the "IT guy" for the team....and when they complained i was like "i dont complain when i get those ID10T errors that you all complain about...like the keyboard isnt plugged in or you have the video card plugged into the mobo and not the gpu...." and they all felt bad...so they let me go....hehe...but for a second there i had the whole team at my throat...and i thought they were going to stone me to death in our animation/server room...hehehe...what an experience

Re: is everyone happy the animations are sent?!
 

You are correct. The storyboard only has to be posted on your team's website.

Re: is everyone happy the animations are sent?!
 

Rendering:

Guys guys guys... those exceedingly long render times are unacceptable.

I knew that I didn't have access to tons of dual-core shiny new Pentiums and Xeons and what-not. I had one dual-core laptop and one Celeron.

The whole time I was doing one animation, I worked on the desktop and rendered on the laptop. It's actually quite an efficient process, having one computer that can sit there and just render while having another to work on.

I kept all my render times down to about 30 sec., 60 sec. at max. You guys should learn how to optimize your render times so you don't have insanely long render sessions. There's absolutely no need for 4-hour render times - you're probably wasting precious time on effects that aren't noticeable or can be easily simulated much quicker.

Raytrace ANYTHING is a good way to hog time. Don't do too much raytracing. If you need to, turn off supersampling (if it isn't already). An reflection map or good specular settings can replace raytracing, especially if they're small objects. Shadow maps can often replace raytraced shadows (and can make soft shadows sometimes).

Realize that you're rendering for TVs. Little things get lost in the fuzziness of regular TVs anyways,

Re: is everyone happy the animations are sent?!
 

I like where this is going. Our animation rendered at like 10-20 seconds a frame but that's only because I realized it would never get done at the old rate of 10 minutes so I went into the settings and changed stuff around. But I think making a list of things one can change to help their scene render at an acceptable rate is a good idea. Let's see,
Turn off ray tracing
Decreasing the amount of hair or leaves
Save time to render at the end
...