Don't push me cuz I'm close to the edge...

...I'm trying not to lose my head (unlike Zeth's thesis). This was running through my brain when I woke up this morning--pretty appropriate for the state I'm in. I'm actually far more on target than I expected, but I am feeling the pressure of everything ending.

So, to calm myself down I've decided to create a checklist to organize all I have left to do.

At the moment I'm animating shot 10, fixing the camera and have yet to spline the animation.

Pre-render checklist:
1. FIXES and tweaks I haven't yet gotten to
2. DUPLICATE AND ANIMATE PIECES to float as stars and for the meteor shower in shot 6b
3. LIGHT LINKING on all the duplicated pieces
4. IMPORT everything so I don't have any rendering errors

During and post-render checklist (assuming the render comes out well--fingers crossed):
1. 3 RENDERS--galaxy, animation, ambient occlusion
(at the bottom of this post are notes on how to do the ambient occlusion pass for when I do it)
2. COMPOSITE in After Effects, throw music video card in lower right at beginning and end:

Justin Catalino
"When the Sky is Falling"
Welcome to Vacationland
Rizzo Records
Director: Matt Kushner

and, after fading to black, add a card that says:

©2007 aniMATTic productions
New York University - Center for Advanced Digital Applications

3. FINISH JOURNAL by copying it and pasting it into Word, write ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS, and POST THESIS CRITIQUE

4. PRINT and BURN two copies of paper, DVD and data disk


How to: Create an Ambient Occlusion Pass
-Make a new render layer with all geometry
-Apply a new lambert, color white
-In the shading group, go to mental ray options>custom
chaders>material shaders options
-In mental ray shaders, choose ambient occlusion
-Then play with the sample #s to make it more smooth, and take longer
-This render layer must be rendered with mental ray

Another option is to just use defaults...
-Make a new render layer with all geometry
-Right-click on the render layer and choose presets>occlusion
-This layer will automatically render with mental ray

COMMAND LINE RENDERING

After a bit of research, I have constructed a line of code for command line rendering that should be really helpful for organizing all the data I'll be rendering.

Here is the full test render code I wrote, and its deconstructed below:

/Applications/Alias/maya7.0/Maya.app/Contents/bin/Render -proj /Users/mattkushner/Documents/maya/projects/Thesis -rd /Users/mattkushner/Documents/maya/projects/Thesis/images/Camera1 -im Camera1 -of tif -s 0000 -e 0001 -cam Shot1Cam_Free -n 2 /Users/mattkushner/Documents/maya/projects/Thesis/scenes/Master/WorkingFiles/041607Shot9b.mb

The first section calls the Maya renderer to do its magic.

-proj project to be used (in case maya is confused)
-rd render directory where the images will go (can create new folders to organize images
-im image name (excluding frame #, and image type)
-of output format
-s start frame
-e end frame
-cam camera to be used (doesn't have to be set to be renderable in Maya)
-n number of processors to use

The last section calls the file from which Maya will render.