Rendering and Editing

All elements of animation have now been completed within the film, so the next step is to render the film. We are using the artificial sun and sky option within Maya to light the film, as this gives us the sense of sunlight that we want for our outside set piece.

We will be rendering two passes of our film; one colour and one using ambient occlusion. On it's own, the colour render does not give the full range of colour depth or shadow that I desire for the film, but by combing the two during editing, this desired effect will be achieved.

As my film has over 8,000 frames, rendering will be a sizeable task. As we are rendering out two copies of each frame (one colour, one ambient) the 8,000 frames now doubles to 16,000.

Undertaking Rendering 

Rendering took place over a period of two weeks, utilising over 15 different computers, which were all working continuously over this period. Stringent file management had to be taken during this period. Each of the eight sequences in the film was rendered together, and stored together within it's own file. Each shot would then be broken down into a sub file, containing the colour passes and the ambient passes. After a shot was completely rendered it would then be signed off, allowing me to make sure a shot wasn't rendered twice accidentally, something which could waste time.

Colour pass

Ambient occlusion pass

Editing

The film was edited in Adobe Aftereffects. As I have used this progrem a number of times in the past, I felt that my familiarity of it would help spped up the editing process. As I wanted to place a lot of colour correction upon my film, I knew that Aftereffects would allow me to do this. Some of my shots ended up rendering either too bright or too dark, so aftereffects allowed me to change this too. 

It was also within Aftereffects that I was able to merge my colour and ambient occlusion layers together. The effect that this process gives is impressive, and really adds another dimension and sense of depth to the film. 

Shot without ambient occlusion...

...And shot with it included.

The editing process is one I enjoy, as it allows me to finally bring together everything that has been created so far, and meld these elements together into my final finished film.