Eventually, on Wednesday after speaking with Jared, we discovered ways to reduce the memory. Remove the lighting, halve the textures, and optimize. It turns out the main problem was due to the number of faces in our scene; it was a huge file so we deleted a lot of unnecessary information - some of the flowers and some of the boulders near the fountain which were slowing things down, and were finally able to start the render at about 7pm!
By this time everyone in the group was very stressed and tired and I think that was probably our lowest moment, but we all got through it by supporting each other and continued forwards.
The next day when we came in, to our horror a lot of our work had still not rendered. James and Karen spent the day working hard trying to fix the problems and I have to admit I felt pretty useless, I had no idea what to do! But eventually, after staying late at college again, we signed in to a lot of computers in the Blue Cave room and left it rendering.
So, with tension running high, we came into college this morning (Friday) to good and bad news. The good being that some of it had rendered and the bad that a few of the computers had blown their fuses trying to get it to work! We set up the rendering again, but unfortunately got kicked out of the cave by the lecturer of a different class so we did the rest of the project using our macbooks and one computer at the back of the cave. What a stressful day!
Luckily, we all worked extremely hard and managed to render a lot of it and composite it together in time for the 4pm deadline. It wasn't the perfect result that we wanted, but I am so proud of our group, we have definately worked very well together and even though some of us had never really met, we got along really well and had a good time. I can't remember us having any arguments or major problems which may not happen in the future in the industry, but it was great experience all the same. Well done team STARS! ^^
Here are a couple of rendered pictures of our project;
It doesn't look exactly like this in our final because some of the render layers failed, but it's still gives an idea of what we have.
The playblast should be available on my other team members blogs, unfortunately i couldn't get it to upload here :(
If we were to do this project again I'm not sure if I would change anything, a little more time would be nice, since we lost the first 2 weeks because of the snow, but that's it. I'm very happy to say it's over but I will miss working with the group, every lesson was really fun and a good experience.
