so…is everyone happy that your animation is out of your hair!!! what does everyone think of those that are submitted?
We ran into some last minute problems, plus converting from AVI to MOV for some reason degraded the quality by about 50% making it very fuzzy (everything was set to 100%) and we didnt have time to check into it. Uploaded the entry with 12 minutes to spare :eek:
We didn’t get to use the music that we wanted. The record company wanted $1000 :ahh: But we finished our animation with in a week of when the theme was released. That I would never have guessed.
I ran into some bad rendering too slow problems, tried to get a render farm going in school but alas, we couldn’t do it because the internets were linked up with the town and stuff and… oohh nvm. Sadly the thing is STILL rendering… will take 3 days… so we don’t have an animation in… but next year, I won’t have 3 weeks wasted cause I didn’t have a computer that could run 3ds max 9. I’m still rendering it on my single comp at home, which will take 3-5 days if left unattended. I’ll put it up on the web to show what I did. I’m just glad I have an animation done, that’s all.
our animation has sound of heart beats, but the volume of them was really low… can only be heard with a sub woofer, or big headphones… 
we are making an bootleg version with credits and fixed sound to put on youtube 
as to the quality of video, we think that it looks perfect!!! 
ooh thats a bummer. I always leave a week for rendering and ask everyone on the robotics team to donate their computer for a weekend. Then I install a 30 day trial of 3ds max so it could be used as a renderer. This years animation though only took four computers one night to render. Last years animation however took 12 computers 4 days to compute. (shudders) that was a long weekend.
I’m releaved but am upset that the animation quality turned to **** after I made it a .mov. but it’s over and i can’t do anything about it now.
Same with us… We had 4 hours to submit the animation, and tried everything, but that ***** codec DV-NTSC messed up with the quality of the image, and our audio turned into crap… Rookie year… This is what happens =p
I just ain’t satisfied with the 30 seconds limit they gave us… I think 45 seconds would turn our animation on something much more professional. But that’s what we’ve got… and we had to make a lot of cuts =p…
But i think it’s fine for a rookie team ^^
DV-NTSC is a good codec, the difference between the unconpressed .avi made in 3ds max and the final .mov file is minimal…
make sure that the option “use high quality video setting when avaliable” is selected in quicktime preferences.
without it the video is horrible…
sigh I tried to warn everyone…
Considering that we lost one of our animators midway through the season and we still got it done early is a miracle.
I’m always relived to get it done. And it’s pretty good.
I am not overly happy with the animation, as the quality necessary to meet the size requirements is below what I desire. Also, the fact that I had to do the whole kit and kaboodle myselft sucked. But it’s done.
Our team’s animation didn’t quite make it this year: It was done with ~3-4 days to spare, but the rendering took much longer than expected. We used a render farm composed of a dual 3.7GHz xeon and a few other p4’s but it didn’t finish in time. The Xeon was taking about 4 minutes per frame, and the P4’s hardly did half of that speed. When we started it out first, we would’ve had it done with over a day to spare, but 3DS Max kept crashing on the computers around frame 10. In the end, we just couldn’t get it done. However, I’ve volunteered the use of my computer to render it and it should be rendered in a little over a day total.
Sadly, this is the second year in a row this has happened to our team. But next year…We’ll be prepared!
It’s wise to save time for rendering, but it’s also wise to find inefficiencies in your rendering settings. I remember, at Nationals last year, going to a little seminar on how to adjust lighting settings to cut down on rendering time. There are always shortcuts. Reducing the number of skylights, the degree of calculation, optimizing models, turning of reflections and other SFX, etc.
Our renderer crashed a lot while we rendered… but we saved as image sequence, so it wasn’t a mess… But a render that would take 2 days, took 6 days on a 4gb 3.5 pentium 4 … And this computer was assigned to 400 frames…While the other pentium 4 2.5ghz with 1 gb ram didn’t crash and made more than 350 frames within 3 days… Strange =p
And we disabled screensaver and these things, but it still crashed, and when the render was ready, we had only 2 days to make the animation and figure out how to use that codec…
The result was obvious… We had 2 hours to upload that file… And we thought zipping it would be a good idea =p… BAH we were wrong… and it didn’t even warn us BEFORE the upload, so we lost 1 hour uploading a zipped file to know it was forbidden… Now here we go without ava submission…
But first isn’t this…Me and the other animator learned a lot from this… one of the things we learned was: Don’t leave things for the last hour… It will always blast on your face =)
And since FIRST isn’t competition, we are satisfied we at least made an animation, even if we couldn’t submit it =)
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
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)
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.
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"
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