Week 7

Mentor’s Feedback Summary

• Focus should be on ingredients not empty jar

• “Crown“ on the jar fill looks strange

• Fill twists too much. Distracting.

FX Work List

• Shot 2

  • Export separate ingredient exr

• Shot 6

  • Switch from bounding sphere to box

  • Reduce twist

  • Change “swirl“ path

FX Testing and Outcomes

• So this week, I needed to get a few things done, first of all, I wanted to address the problem with the “crowning“ in the jar fill.

  • Before: using a group node being guided by a bounding box to add points into an “ACTIVE“ group.

  • After: using VEX to add points to an “ACTIVE“ group when they are below a point.

  • The big reason that I made this switch is because the group node was the cause of the stepping that was happening on the fluid, since the node was only grouping every frame and not during the substeps, with VEX I can have it group for every substep.

• Another change I made was to how I apply materials to everything.

  • Before: every material had its own separate geometry.

  • After: Now, only the truffles and cookie crumbles have their own geometries and materials. The gelatos and caramel, are now separated by a color attribute, and then the materials are applied to the specific value of the colors.

  • This allowed me to only need one vdb particle remesh, which decreases my render times, and allows materials to “blend” with one another.

I used blend nodes to mix the materials together

• Motion Blur was turned on this week, I just needed to make sure that my velocity attribute was transferred from my particles to my mesh.

Velocity transferred with attrib transfer

Render Farm Troubles

• This week was filled with troubles rendering, but I did my best and I worked with my team to find workarounds.

  • Issue one: exr.lock — I consistently came back to frames 186 - 250 with the extension exr.lock.

    • I checked the logs and they came back with DEBUG: render exit code 134

    • I couldn’t find anything about it online, so I asked around to see if anyone knew anything, and someone with a similar issue suggested that it might be kicking me off because my render is using too much “RAM“.

    • I tried reducing my RAM usage by caching out my mesh, so the farm computers don’t have to deal with any meshing. Which ended up working for me :)

  • Issue two: Farm goes down — It happens, the farm goes down, but I still need to get renders for the week, so I render it locally.

    • About 15hrs of rendering split between two computers.

    • I accidently put .#### instead of $F4 for my frame padding ;[