Today was the last day of class and we still have some more work to do. We've been trying to render the animation in mental ray over the past several days, but ran into some serious rendering difficulties.

When we click the clacker, Maya says either "fatal memory error" or "out of memory".
When we batch render inside of Maya, the color layer gets to 0% - 5% and says that the render is completed, but the image file is broken.
When we right click the file outside of Maya and render through the windows explorer menu, it seems to render fine, but nothing is smoothed.

I think that the problem is that we don't have enough RAM to handle all of the textures. All of the Targa sequences for the arcade screens are 2.5 GB all together right now. When mental ray tries to load all of those plus all of the other textures into the RAM, it needs more memory than is available. Also, when I turn on texture preview inside of Maya's viewport, the program crashes.

Another student at UTD suggested that we convert all of the textures to .map (mental ray's default texture format). So we'll try that next. But Sarah went ahead and rendered half of the animation with the Maya Software renderer, since that seemed to be working, just to have something to show for the last day of class.


We're definitely going to try to finish the animation over the summer. There is still some keyframe animation and lighting that needs to be done, among other little things. I'm going to make a to do list everything that still needs to be done in another post. Sarah has an internship in LA over the summer, and Jorge and I will be moving back down to A&M in the next week or two for summer classes there. So we're going to take a break from the project for the next week or two, and then we're going to set a schedule and meet once or twice a week to work on the project so we can hopefully have it finished by the end of the summer.

- David