Atom Pancakes - Sneak Peak

AtomPancakes have been progressing with the animation. We still have a fair way to go, but there are one or two scenes which are almost ready for rendering.

You can see some of my animation progress on the AtomPancakes blog here (and from there you can click to the home page to see the rest of the groups posts), but if you are just looking for the latest sneak peak then jump to the end of this post!

Apart from animation, I've been in charge of sorting out the rendering for this project. While raytracing has been a constant enemy (increasing render times to over half an hour per frame) I have been finding ways to break things down, optimising settings and so on. While this has made rendering less than as straight forward as pressing a button, it has meant that we can still maintain the quality while now only taking a few minutes per frame.

Using Mental Ray's Rasterizer mode has enables us to use quality motion blur on the character, and by separating the character to its own layer, we can render everything else without motion blur, using Mental Ray's scanline (default) mode. (Which renders the environments much quicker)

We are also going to be splitting up the background so that we only have to render one frame of that, assuming the camera doesn't move, and utilising soft depth map shadows instead of raytracing them.

The only thing holding us back (but not by much) is getting all the scenes animated in time, and a few more textures that need to be painted to complete the environments.

I think we shall manage to get everything done though.

So here is a sneak preview of the character dressed as the maid from one of the dream sequences, with the cold dead body under the spotlight!

(Click image to enlarge)


That's all for now, and probably this year.

A Flock of Pixels