In One Word - Describe Today

'Hell' be that word!  With almost no positive outcomes of today we really struggled to render out any good shots.  We did however have a chat with Dan Dalli (or was this Monday I can't recall) about sorting out our project and textures.  We have now all finished the textures and modeling now and all we did today was tweak and reset the file's textures when importing with one another.  We saved them to the Public drive which we no is risky as anyone can delete but we have a back up on the Vanguard (Render Farm)  We struggled to set this up with our textures on but we managed to after messing around for an hour or so.  Strange thing is we are having a serious problem with Rendering in that we set something to Render and NOTHING comes out... it fails.  I may try and Render out a shot from Tom's and Mine together and then a Shot from the scene with Alec and Simon's in (the backdrop) and see if I can somehow Render it like this in two files (exporting the camera movements from one to another) and then render it ... compile in photoshop as different layers and possibly using an Alpha Mask.  Would really like to ask Rob Lee Jones about this problem however I'm not too sure about when he's coming back.  I think thats what I'll be doing tomorrow if I'm not animating the Crows Nest Shot.

Tom has been finishing his texures and models today while Alec has been practising his animation skills on a horse which looks great :) of course it does - Alec is doing it :)  Simon's houses again, top notch and adding more and more detail for the backdrop... however it all adds to our render time which apparently even the render farm can't handle.  I'm determined to get it going properly though.  I will try to Render the large scene in one, one more time and then move on to the split idea I had and see if that works.

If all else fails... playblasts... deleting history and try again.  Possibly delete history before and see if that makes a difference.  Either way I got pretty annoyed at the rendering situation as I sat there for the majority of the day sorting out files and watching Maya crash and burn as I hit 6 and it attmpted to load textures - I can't even check they work properly as it crashes everytime.   Maya is a good thing when it works how you want it.  Its like Oil.... works in your car and keeps it running most the time but can set alight and blow up with the strike of a match!!!!  Weird analogy but hey... I'm pretty shattered and it's been a VERY long day full of bad renders.

Summed up - got a few layers out of Mine and Toms however need to perfect how I will add different sections to the layers (eg Toms and mine ADDED to Alec's and Simons work).

I sit here now waiting for yet another Render to test on my slow Mac ... and now I have to paint weights again as Tom unfortunately did something to his Rig to deform areas of him BADLY.  Luckily I have a saved copy where I started painting them and can work on that.... here we go again....