alright...just 2 more weeks to go, the energy is fading but the will is still persistent, our project is on the brink of completion with only some minor fixes to adjust, as well as adding the intro and outro. we have a draft of the movie score which was worked on by my trusty sister, i helped her out by providing references and showing her a sample of what we are looking for.
this week has been lazy to say the least, not in the sense of procrastination, but in the sense of lacking enough work to do. the biggest thing i did this week was help my teammate render one of her shots on Fox Renderfarm, which i will be talking about in a bit. apart from some other tasks i finished for my internship unit that i'm taking alongside this one, i've been trying to take it easy considering work has been light.
coming back to the Fox task we submitted, it was a re-render of the opening shot at the beginning of the film, the establishing shot, we had to re-render that shot because we needed a blank background so we can insert an overlay of the sky and sea. the render of this shot would have normally taken a couple of days, maybe more, but with the great assistance from Fox, it got done in an hour.
each batch of frames (approximately 200 each) took about 20 minutes each, so with 2 batches the shot was done in well under an hour, with minimal cost as well, which was convenient for us. speaking of the the cost, Fox were offering a great deal at the time of our crisis, which was a gift coupon event, where you get double the amount you recharge.
here is an example i have of the coupon event, i would recharge $100 and get a $100 coupon, there is a 50% coupon as well but the full value is definitely the one to go. considering we are students, Fox have been kind enough to give us the diamond tier account which is about half the rendering cost as the ordinary account
(Fox Renderfarm, pricing)
this was a game changer for us, along with the extra nodes they provide us, Fox have made it easy for us to get our project done. based on their website, Fox have been around since 2011, partnering with huge names such as V-ray, Autodesk and Arnold, with a team consisting of industry professionals and highly skilled artists (Fox Renderfarm, about, 2011)
Fox have accommodated many individual creators and freelancers, their service has options that make it the best cloud rendering farm out there, "There is a saying that “time is money”, which explains why cloud render farms exist. Considering that rendering might require a large amount of time (or even days), designers who are using a cloud render farm have endless rendering power at their disposal!" ( Fox, interview by CGtrader, Designers are more likely to use a render farm instead of crashing their own PCs for countless days,2018 )
as mentioned in the same interview, there have been some great animated shorts rendered on Fox that went viral on YouTube, one of them being the Minecraft parody "Trust Me" by EnchantedMob which has garnered over 25 million views. with hits like that, Fox have become on of the leading cloud render services in the market, which is why i trust them.
this was the majority of the work i've done this week. lots of it being on Fox and doing test renders, as for the coming weeks, we only have to composite the film and colour grade, as well as insert the intro and outro.
REFERENCES
About Fox Render Farm Company | Fox Render Farm. (n.d.). Fox Renderfarm. Retrieved December 8, 2020, from https://www.foxrenderfarm.com/about.html
V. (2018, February 22). Fox Renderfarm: “Designers are more likely to use a render farm instead of crashing their own PCs for countless days.” CGTrader. https://www.cgtrader.com/blog/fox-renderfarm-designers-are-more-likely-to-use-a-render-farm-instead-of-crashing-their-own-pcs-for-countless-days-2018-02