Rendering / Post rendering.

Test view: This is the scene I'm demonstrating, the camera directly infront is the close angled Lens, while the one to the side is the wide angle, this is just to  show off different aspects of rendering, which will be shown shortly.

Vector: Simple Geometry, no shading, the default colours, no glow no special effects. This special rendering style is actually used in South Park episodes, simply shapes, simple movements, no shading  needed.

Shake: This simply changes the position of the camera slightly using X,Y Co-ordinates, this is a good way to mimic a bumpy ride, by having the camera shake even Simulating an earthquake by purely making it shake up and down.

Software: Software is a smoother rendering method,  but cannot do too many details, smoothing is disabled on objects. Lighting is disabled, but textures can be rendered, as well as certain special effects such as Particles.

Hardware: While Hardware is a more indepth way to render,  rendering lighting, textures, shading, special effects like glows. Smooth rendering can occurs

Wide lens: Changes the way the scene is rendered, making the subject in question smaller, while rendering out whatever would have been cut out. And the opposite is true for The zoomed in lens, where the focus is zoomed in on, and anything around is essentially cut out of frame. Different camera lenses can make thedifference between showing a wide shot of many people, making them seem far away, while the close up lens allows you to focus on details, close up. And this all can be accessed in the rendering options.

Next up, the actual rendering process, Here are the following things you need to use to render:

Camera.

Start and end frame. (Beginning and end)

Render type. (Software,Hardware or Vector)

Single frame render or video. (Save as one single frame, or from start to end frames)

File type (Png, AVI,etc), file name.File Location. 

FPS (Frames per second)

Now as for my actual animation, I decided to go with medium quality animation, partnered with medium lighting (To speed up rendering time). I am initially rendering out every 200 frames. So I can stitch them all together as I need them. I will render out frames 1-200, then 201-400, and so on and so forth until I hit 900 (30 seconds) So that means I am rendering 6.6 seconds each avi clip. Although the rendering seems to stop at frame 639 for some reason, so I'm trying to skip frame 639, due to it causing render crashes. It only seemed to be on the snowspeeder camera, so my solution was to switch rendering to a different camera, and it seems to have worked, no idea why this happened however, just a weird glitch where the rendering thought it was finished when it really wasn't.

My settings are set to 720p HD settings, so the width and height are within the requirements of the assignment, as well as my animation being 30fps, again, the requirement for the assignment.

I was originally rendering out the animation in one big chunk... But the animation would crash before it reached that point, so I changed to rendering in chunks (At a lower shading quality too) This was to make it so I should at the very least have something from a rendering session, instead of losing everything just to try again, wasting more time than I already did.

The plan for all the animations is to have editing done post (So motionblur, screen formatting, audio etc). I have multiple camera angles (If I can render them all) to show different perspectives of the actual animation. 

Now for what's actually happening in post rendering (Editing in other words). First of all the editing software I'm using is Adobe after effects, as I've had previous experience with this editing software before. I decided to do a few simple edits. One being snow in the scene, thanks to a solid black layer, I get to set a layer of snowfall, something for the background. But I have the black removal on so the snow is overtop of the video file, without any issue. Additionally in one part of the animation I decided to add a lensflare, to mimic the effect of a blast, like a bomb going off in the distance. As the Star destroyer and Tie fighters can be seen later fleeing the scene.

An actual scene of mention is the first scene, which actually uses a fair bit of exposure effects, starting from a bright light, eventually fading until it shows the ships, the target of the animation. This actually did require a reshoot, as the animation the first time, wasn't rendering the right camera... A negative to Maya, where changing the rendering camera is much more complex than other software. Meaning I missed an entire scene, and I needed to rerender, wasting valuable time.

Next patch of editing is actually when I start to use a couple of adjustments layer, These are essentially edits to any layer below, mainly I did a fair bit of warping of the screen after hitting a giant snowboulder on the way to the ramp. This was admittedly a way to hide one of the flaws of the original rendering going down the spiral, at least for part of it. But I decided to add some error text, explaining what's going on with the visuals, since the Camera's going through issues. Which was placed above the warping adjustment layers just so the text was untouched. While the snow effect was below the Adjustment layer, so you don't see random flakes of snow during the warping process, kind of throwing off the illusion of a video glitch. In addition for the ending, it's a news broadcast of the imperial star destroyer, with the logo and a BBC styled text banner, acting as an overlay, which comprises of an image with a transparent background with the banner, some scrolling text, which is also made with after effects. And finally the imperial logo, edited to be red to match the banner. The text changes during crucial points of the broadcast, thanks to keyframing values, like the camera reboot sequence. And during this star wars imperial march (Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qYPIf8UE0wc ) is playing in the background, and when the broadcast begins to get interrupted, the music also begins to distort. 

Next post effects editing was quite simply put, changing the speeds of clips. So for example if the rendered scene is a bit too slow, I can speed up the clip by going into Layer, time, time stretch. This is essential to this animation, as certain parts as rendered take too long or not long enough to actually take effect. and is much easier and faster to edit than rerendering.

And one technique which is... Cheaply done, was the fire and explosions effects, this was made using greenscreening techniques, which actually looked good, apart from being a completely different style than the animation itself, due to the fact it's a real explosion and real fire. But in the end, I kept the flame on point, kept it rotated and scaled as I needed it, and it looked pretty ok. Alternatively I would have used Particles for smoke instead, but.. In the Particles blog, I already mentioned the issues with Particle emitters in Maya.