Rendering

It was important to use the correct rendering settings to optimise the animation and the way it looks.

I made sure I use a mental ray renderer which creates a better look for the finished animation as I have used mental ray shadows and light.

I used the HDTV setting to export the animation. The HDTV setting is set to 1280 x 720. This will give an optimal frame rate and ratio setting that would be great for widescreen TV's otherwise the animation will look old in an 4:3 ratio.

In some scenes the green plane seem to illuminate the other shapes such as the wall. To overcome this problem I reduced the final gather from 1.0 to 0.3. This gave a much more realistic effect and didn't make the grass look radioactive!

The rendering took longer than I thought as Scene 1 took almost 3 hours. The others scenes had considerably less frames and therefore took less time.

I was glad I did not use fur or grass effect on my animation as it considerably increased the rendering time for my friends who did. I didn't think it added much to the animation either.

Once all the scenes had been rendered I had to compile them into one video.