This is the “Final” version of my OXUS Animation, I meant to post it on here about a month ago, and I just kept forgetting to create a blog post for it here. So here is the video:
Feel free to click the maximize button as this is rendered out at a full 1920 x 1080, and it was a beast to render. The render took about 5 days on my i7-2700k, during that time it utilized virtually full 100% capacity on all 8 threads. I’m thinking that I may really need to look into optimizing my files better, or setting up some network based rendering as well, I do have some extra computers that might have been able to help a bit with it. I did however bake all the simulations before the render, and I’m pretty sure that helped with the render times immensely.
I put the “Final” in quotation marks above, as I hope this is the last rendition of this video, but I have found a few things in it that popped up last minute, or weren’t evident till after I had finished the final render. One of the things that I didn’t like at all was the blue lighting that was supposed to held represent the diffuse/bounce light under the water, it made the hoses and the bottom of the ship almost look like they were glowing and really caused the explosion to flare up a bit brighter, as well as it caused the final smoke to not really look like oil smoke anymore and it doesn’t stand out nearly as much as I’d like. I am considering re-rendering the project after making a few more things to it, specifically adding another form of deployment where an Oxus SHRC system can be deployed via another ship instead of having to be anchored beside the well in a stand-by position. One other thing that became a huge problem in this render was the green methanol smoke that is used to prevent hydrates in the collection cone. In my initial test renders it came out nice and wispy and smoke like, but then in all my actual renders, low-res and high-res it started coming out as what looked like a big ball of cotton candy. I couldn’t quite figure out what the problem was and I eventually convinced myself that it was because the underwater fog system was reacting with the smoke system to create the cotton candy effect. My solution was to render out everything but the smoke system and then composite them together after. However I was really frustrated when the smoke system showed up looking like cotton candy again even when rendered by itself. It turned out that I had forgotten to bake the smoke system and that was all the problem was it was just miscalculating during the slow renders, I could have actually rendered out everything together and have had it look nice, if only I would have double checked the bake on my smoke system. Oh well lesson learned. I think the video is looking really good, but I really want to do something about that blue light still, I need to go through and break a few light links as well as I need to turn its intensity down quite a bit, I’m wondering if I should change its colour a little bit too. Don’t be surprised if you see another OXUS update on here in the next little bit.