Ok so the trailer for Of Gods and men has went live (which I had to bang out in 30 mins after 750 miles of train rides to and from Leamington Spa and back, after a last minute request for a trailer for EUE). After working on this and the many things that have went wrong around my short like a cloud of badness, it's got to the stage where I can almost no longer look at it. After writing brand new aps such as exodus to basically do what massive does..only my way and thus meaning I don't have to fork out a fortune for massive..... and many other things such as an auto skinning plug in for max and Maya (that came too late for the 1st part of my short), I have came to the stage where due to the compromises I've had to make due to every render engine I own dying on me (sticking 3.3 billion polys work of animated skeleton army will do that for any render engine it seems lol) I have been reduced to diffuse only passes from 3delight.
look no motion blur lol
That alone kills me as I know what it'd look like with the right passes to play with in comp instead of having to find a way to hack it together to make it look 'passable'. That was never the aim. The original dragon rig (which is what you see in the trailer) is seriously fucked up...you cannot parent it to a spline path in any way due to the rig being broke (I didn't rig it lol), there was 2 other rigs done by some mates but alas they arrived too late to render that stuff out as it was taking 20 mins a frame without motion blur. Even Breitbilds render farm can't be handed over for free for the length of time it would have taken.
I had every single bug ever recorded pop up in every single app I've used in some cases causing the whole thing to grind to a halt for days and in one occasion a week and a half..... I've had people who swore blind they would help pull out for various reasons which meant it went from 'Wayne makes a nice short with help from a few mates in 4 months' to 'Wayne tries to save his short with zero help in 2 months with broken software.
After months of pulling till 3am and 4am each night 7 days a week I'm as near burnt out on this project as I want to get. To put it very bluntly I'm sick to fucking death ot it and am very close to saying 'fuckit' and doing something else for end user event.
close up of one of the skeleton scenes in Exodus (notice low res sheild to try and save to enormous polycount)
Why? as I know that every problem or issue with that short whether my fault or not, stops with me... I'm not the sort of bloke to go naming names and trying to spread the shit around. So here are a few images that are from the dev of 'of gods and men', some that were lost back when I lost a month's worth of work on it after a drive went bang. They may be more representative of what's went on behind it than the actual trailer or the short itself.
An image (oneof only 2 that survive) from the lost months worth of work
Times ran out, there is no way to make this better at this stage. I have a choice to either suck it up and chalk it down to a bad deal or throw my toys out of the pram and can it completely. The jury's still out as to how adult I'll be over it after months of my life spent on it. Simply put as it stands it doesn't match the vision I've had in my head for 23 years. Maybe I've just been overworking...I dont know.
