Ok, so my last post was sort of my cracking round the edges due to insane self imposed deadline post. if you'd asked me then I'd have told you that there was no way in cold hard hell I could finish part one of my short film 'Of Gods& Men'. There was simply not enough time to render it all and edit it the way I wanted to. I had at once point yesterday 80 hours minimum of render times left on my single machine capable of rendering the crowd produced by my app 'Exodus' and only 72 hours to do it in. The sums simply didn't add up......
Then I had one of my patent Wayne 'fantastic new ideas'. I create a very simple render engine that that OpenGL based that would allow me to output the flat diffuse passes for some shots of the armies of man and the army of the dead. This saved enough time so I could render out a AO pass with a custom shader I wrote for Renderman. Its fair to say without the copy of Renderman Pixar gave me...Ivd never have finished this in time. So much so that they get a special thankyou in the credits.
So today around 1pm I finished the final edit of 'Of Gods & Men'. So now I just have to trawl through zillions of files to round stuff up for end user event for my lectures. Tomorrow I have to do a shot for something for a client / firm that I'll announce in a few days once the embargo is lifted (if you're at the End User Event you will get a sneak preview of the news), sorry to be all cloak and dagger but an embargo is an embargo.
The idea for the army of men and the army of the dead come obviously from the old Ray Harryhausen stuff he did on sinbad and the orginal clash of the titans. Those are my dads favorite films and the thoght occured to me years back why not have an army of them and not just 6 or seven. I answered that question myself in the making of this short as its a fucking logistical nightmare to render in 3D thats why lol. AO passes take miles longer due to all the bones near each other. Where as a character scene took maybe 2 mins a frame (I was doing some clever stuff if I do say so myself to get it down even to this), the skeletons took 5-10 mins a frame at lowest possible render setting.
So in the making of part 1 I've went the full gamut of emotions, its nearly drove me insane and half to death in equal measure. I've not been to bed before 3 or 4am in so long I can't remember..and stress levels started running dangerously high the last few weeks (hence my drama queen moment in the post before this one). Are there things I'd like to change...yeah sure there are, but for a budget of £25 and a time of 2 months 95% of the work done solo I think it'll stand up well.
I'm going to have a word with a few 3D mates....as it people who are real but work in 3D ..and are mates...I'm talking not about talking to imaginary 3D models here lol. anyways...I want to have a word with them and see if they ting I should keep part 1 back till part 2 is done (which could take quite some time as there are some seriously challenging shit in it) or put it out as part 1. Right now I'm ping ponging back and forth between elation and finally not having to look at another skeleton or fucking dragon for a while and an odd empty feeling coz it's done.
So yet again I snatch a win back from the brink of failure .... as I said once before I don't 'do' failure..not even a little bit. As a result of this short I've got some seriously nice apps and tech all of my own no one else has...or is going to have. That will have a longer lasting effect than the actual short on my workflows I'm betting
