Unfortunately, I had to spend a lot of yesterday reapplying and tweaking textures. Even though the file path was 100% correct, the maya files were not registering on the models, possibly because I had been editing the animation at home rather than on the same computer that I set the textures on; I spent the day trying to do a little quality assurance on each scene in terms of textures and lighting in order to ensure that they were all ready for rendering and looking as close to the original render as I could possibly get them.
I did one test render of the opening scene just to ensure that the quality was OK, and this only took about an hour to finish up. I assumed, because of this, we might be quite quick with rendering. However, turning the resolution up to 1080p HD and increasing the camera quality in the render seems to have had a huge effect on our render time: Ellie and Ciara both stayed in uni last night to supervise the opening scene of the animation as it rendered and we didn’t even get through rendering the opening scene in the hours over night. We’ve started to render out over several computers, hopefully this should speed up the process, but I am feeling very nervous about rendering time. I think we underestimated how long this process would take
Edit: Over the render time, 3 days, we discovered that there were corrupted files within the image sequence of our 5th scene. We found this on submission day, which was really worrying – thankfully, Alec pushed the deadline back two days and this has allowed us the extra time we needed in order to get the corrupted files re-rendered and get the full rendered piece edited.