I thought I would actually be writing more posts about this kind of subject, but to be honest production has been going pretty smooth. However, I ran into one of my first small changes I needed to make which is what I want to discuss.

As you may know, I complete all of the backgrounds in Cosmic Rage in a 3D animation program called Cinema 4D or C4D. Some of these renders can be slightly time consuming and others go by pretty quick. Lots of things go into effect when setting up these renders and also many things contribute to how long these renders take.

The current shot I am working on involves a 3D city view with a nice camera move to travel up close to a set of doors since the shot is setting up where the scene takes place. I spent some time this week putting together some test renders to get some of the texturing and lighting right.

During these tests, it isn’t uncommon to knock the settings down to get faster results. Once I was happy with the camera move I set up the final render. The final render time estimation was simply too long to wait, so I needed to lower the settings. I spent most of today letting my computer render while I was at work, but when I got home I felt that the quality of the render wasn’t good enough to keep the computer rendering to finish it. The reason for this is an effect called aliasing, which makes the image kinda flicker in areas and most noticeably in areas of high contrast. Given the grungy nature of the scene, it simply wasn’t acceptable.

As a way to compromise on quality and movement, I rendered out a larger image and will have to do a scale instead of having a camera move. This way I can get moving onto the next shot and not have to worry about the shot looking bad. Can’t wait to share more next week!