Okay, so we’re way over halfway through the project, and I’m having to make some critical decisions. So far I haven’t really had a proper plan in mind for the actual content of the film, I’ve just been making rooms and doing minor little tests for the ‘installations’ in each room. That has now changed.
One of the big factors in me completing this on time, a factor which I have constantly had in mind but until now have not fully considered, is rendering time. The problem with having many rooms and multiple simulations to animate while still allowing time for shots to sort of linger and not rush on too quickly, is that those render times are gonna just keep on creeping up. Most of the scenes I have currently render at around 3 to 5 minutes per frame, depending on the scene and what is in shot. That doesn’t sound awful, and for a still render that would be fantastic, but this is motion graphics, not... graphics? (Yeah, okay, poor joke, I know.) Lets average it out and say 4 mins a frame, that equates to 96 minutes per second of animation. If my film was, say, 4 minutes long (or 240 seconds), that would mean 23,040 minutes of rendering time. I’ll save you some working out: that’s 16 days. Yup. You see my problem. Even cutting that running time in half to 2 minutes would mean about a week of straight rendering. And it’s not as if I could possibly want to use my PC at all within that time, amirite? Remember how I said I’m using Redshift because of how fast it is? ...Nice one eh? In all seriousness though, if Redshift is gonna take that long, imagine how long Physical would take. Ha, gg. Also, it doesn’t help that my hardware isn’t exactly ‘industry standard’. A GTX 980 isn’t bad, I’ve never really had any problems running games, but it’s not best suited to this kind of workload... (psst, anyone got any spare 1080 TIs...?)
So I sat down and really thought it all out, planning specific camera shots, finding ways to link scenes together and otherwise getting rid of stuff. I even draw up an actual storyboard that I’m going to stick to as much as possible. The sad part is I’m dropping a couple of rooms. RIP. The rooms in question are the room with the drain, and by extension the spherical basement room too. I am, however, promoting the sphere from that room to a core element of the film. It will serve as a kind of continuity device to take the viewer/camera from scene to scene.
Although I’m now going to end up not using a lot of the stuff I’ve already made, which kinda sucks, I’m actually fully fine with it. For possibly the first time in this project so far, I have an actual plan to stick to, I feel like I have direction, and I’m really confident despite the looming deadline.
Lets get this boi finished... Y E E T