Render Farm issues and Maya updates

02/07/20

Yesterday I managed to render out at least two of my shots on the render farm, however overnight Maya has updated and I've run into a range of issues. using exactly the same method as yesterday I attempted to upload my files onto the render farm, however I was running into issues with shots failing and not rendering so I quickly suspended all of my files. 

Looking through it seemed as though the textures had reverted to being threaded back to my D Drive, and setting the project to the Y Drive and trying to relink then reload the textures wouldn't work, so I may have to do those by hand, which may end up taking quite awhile. I've started rethreading the textures on shot 2 as while I did get a rendered file the scientists looked very shiny, so I went through the textures and made sure they would have a matte finish, however even rethreading these textures in by hand has still lead to failed renders on the render farm, so I'm not quite sure what the issue is, or if I've missed a rogue texture somewhere, I'm hoping to get this issue sorted out tomorrow as I will be away after lunch and working over the weekend, as I have the animations all finished, I just need to get them up on the render farm.

03/07/20 
I have a feeling that the issues are stemming from the texturing issues, so I spent all of today rethreading the textures. I found a way to do this slightly faster then through opening the dialogue box, selecting the set folder and finding the texture I wish to replace, Instead I just change the file location while keeping the file name and hit enter, it isn't as easy as setting the location once and hitting reload but at this point its the only thing that I find will work. I managed to get everything rethreaded and if I can get the issues sorted out on monday I'll be ready to put things up on the render farm. I also went through the process of taking all the frames and putting it into After affects to piece together the frames into an animation, before exporting that to Premiere, where I lined it up overtop my playblast clips. While I could have done this for my 2nd shot I really don'tr want to have shiny scientists, so I want to rerender that shot so it looks better. 

06/07/20

It turns out that there have been a few issues on the render farm which are currently trying to be fixed, so the deadline has been pushed back to Friday. I hope that the issues I was having will get resolved and I'll be able to get things rendered out. for now I've updated my playblast animation with the final animations unrendered. I'm not sure when the farm will be fixed but I plan on trying again on wednesday to see if things will work.