Further effort is made for the animatics. Few issues are spotted during the process. First, the rendering performance is quite low and it is difficult to get real-time feedback from the render. With the relative large model, over 100 MB, the rendering with MentalRay can easily consume all the video memory and force to use CPU render due to lack of resources. Maya 2017 keeps crashing with over 20 GB main memory and 1 GB swap memory assigned. It seems the integrity of Maya 2017 is tested and it is less stable than 2016 version. Eventually, we managed to obtain a video clip rendered with Maya 2016 with less quality.
Second, there are some contradictions within the scene. The story was planned during a late night in a remote village. However, the lighting seems less consistent during the render which should be improved in the future. Also, scene happened during the night is generally more difficult to manage since it must be dark while the characters must still be shown.
Third, quality control becomes an issue later on. We had some great ideas and storyboard but to convert them to 3D animation is challenging. Maya is a complicated software and a lot of techniques are unknown to us. It may be better to restrict the project to more specific and practical approach rather than simply hoping to achieve all. Say an example can apply the sound effect to an existing animation. Or create photo realistic scene of a surrounding area. Essentially, when quality is too low for a project, students may not gain much from it even the project trying to cover everything.