Problems Encountered

The main problem I found for this scene was that when rendering none of the rendering engines for Maya were working properly for my scene, either the render came out as a completely black screen or alternatively looked fine within the render view but got ridiculously dark when saving the image sequence. To remedy this I first attempted to google the problem to see if any other users were encountering the same problem as me, as I found, there were multiple posts about this exact problem, solutions ranged from changing the gamma settings to reconfiguring the lighting of the scene, I tried most of the solutions given but none seemed to work on my machine. I then took the files and attempted to render on my housemate’s PC, only to find upon pressing the render still button, Maya crashed multiple times. I was very frustrated during this process as I had made a few test renders of previous camera maps which had worked fine.

I then contacted my tutor to see if he could help me in remedying the problem, after looking for more solutions he found a forum post stating that a user with the same problem had contacted Solid Angle who informed him that it was a known bug with Arnold renderer and that a future update will fix the problem. My tutor then recommend that I look into screen capturing my scene and animation as a workaround.

After some messing around within the software I found that I could just use the playblast feature within Maya, which renders out an image sequence using the standard viewport, while the sequence was obviously not as high quality as an actual render, it worked quite well and was sufficient enough to be placed in my final showreel.

Reflecting on this, I have to take responsibility for leaving my render so close to the deadline, as well as not properly researching render engines in Maya, in the future I must remember to look into this at a much earlier point. Whilst it was a very hard lesson to learn, it has definitely affected how I will approach future projects.