Avery Brown, Week 06 Journal
This week was frustrating, the render farm being in an abysmal state. I have sent IT some e-mails about it, and I have figured out how to get successful jobs through the farm. A very large portion of machines are completely unusable, but I have a list of working machines that I have been using to some success. We were able to render shot HRD 021, though there is still much to do.
We had rendered a lighting test earlier as well.
I am now mostly caught up with importing assets into Maya. Now all that remains are ones that I haven’t modeled yet. The reactor is rigged to have motion in several spots.
Everything has been given some semblance of materiality. This is a general sense of the material settings, without textures, based on their real world counterparts. Things like IOR and roughness are the most affected.
When I did some more refined lighting this week, I realized that we were lacking in light fixtures, so I quickly whipped some up.
I also built the model of the main view screen,
And built some greeble panels for the hallways.
On Sunday, which I usually give myself as a day off, I spent a couple hours writing a useful versioning script. It isn’t 100% yet, but it is functional and will hopefully make everyone’s lives a slight bit easier.
#Func: Save Version
#Params: None
#Returns: None
#Button to save a new version
#get current file path
#run func to get split string path
#add one to version number
#check if this file exists
#save
def saveVersion () :
currentName = mc.file(q = True, sceneName = True)
if utitledFileCheck (currentName) :
return
if not renderFileCheck(currentName, q = True) :
parsedName = parseVersionNumber(currentName)
else :
parsedName = renderFileCheck(currentName, q = False)
nameIsolated = parsedName[0]
oldVersionNumber = parsedName[1]
newVersionNumber = oldVersionNumber + 1
newName = "{0}{1}.ma".format(nameIsolated, str(newVersionNumber).zfill(2) )
continueCheck = True
whileIdx = 0
while (continueCheck) :
if mc.file (newName, q = True, exists = True) :
whileIdx = whileIdx + 1
print "{} exists".format(newName)
newName = "{0}{1}.ma".format(nameIsolated, str(newVersionNumber + whileIdx).zfill(2) )
else :
continueCheck = False
mc.file( rename = newName )
mc.file( save=True, type='mayaAscii' )
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Hours Breakdown:
- Environment Modeling – 21:00
- Environment Surfacing – 6:00
- Paperwork – 1:00
- Website Admin – 0:30
- Technical Directing – 10:00
- Character Surfacing – 1:00
- Adviser Meeting – 2:00
- Group Meeting – 0:30
Total: 42:00
Positives:
Was finally able to run a job on the farm.
Negatives:
Still worried about the state of the render farm.