After 20 grueling weeks, I have finally wrapped on this project and I couldn't be happier. Of course there's still some things I would love to go back and fix and keep reiterating, but for now, it is complete. I'm so happy with how it turned out in the end, and I learned so much at every stage of the pipeline throughout the process of making this. Please enjoy my senior thesis Rise and Shine.
I'm very worried about getting this project done. I was having extreme issues with the farm due to the power outage on last Tuesday, so I wasn't able to get everything rendered that I wanted to. Up next, I'm going to continue lighting and texturing/making sure everything across my files are consistent for our class 20 submissions. Unfortunately, I haven't heard back from sound design yet for an in-progress update, but hopefully they will get back to me soon.
This weekend, I decided I was going to start the process of denoising/sampling the opening shots and the first part of my sequence. I started reading the Redshift documentation and found out that there are 3 denoising engines that Redshift works with. I found that I got the best result with Optix, which is linked to NVIDIA.
I think these shots are completely done (except for some lens flares/color grading in post) but I'm really happy with the denoising that I got with Optix, so I decided to do a trial render of the first part using with Optix enabled. (**NOTE** This test has not been color managed, which is why it is washed out! These are the raw files straight from the farm)
This yielded pretty decent results (I had good luck with the farm for once), but revealed a lot of minor problems that I wanted to fix (before/afters posted below). Obviously, there's still some denoising/more research that I need to do regarding Optix and its usage on SCAD's render farm in particular (I don't know if it did much in the sequence or if it's wishful thinking), but I feel pretty good about wrapping up the first part by Wednesday.
I've also been trying to match my files so the cut between the files is seamless. I've gotten fairly close, but I need to go through with a fine tooth comb and make sure all of the lighting rigs have consistent placement/value in both files and that I'm getting identical results when rendering the same frame from each file.
