After around three days of day-and-night attempting to figure out why the ground plane and geo were not moving as expected with the camera, I was growing frustrated. I’d even resorted to moving the scene around with the camera, effectively messily counter-animating, but after two render attempts I had to accept that this was not only a waste of time, but also would never achieve the desired results.
I’d attempted to parent the scene to the camera, and I’d looked into some of my old tracked shots to figure out what I’d done wrong, but could find no answers. Growing weary of searching for a solution, I forced myself to make a concrete list brainstorming possibilities.
I decided, overtired and unmotivated, that the easiest thing to do for the time being would be to look into 3DE’s orientation view and see if there was a mismatch in how the camera interacted with the scene in Maya vs 3DE, although I strongly doubted that the issue I was experiencing was related to the track and suspected more that it was due to the way I’d set up the scene or my hierarchy, though I couldn’t figure out the exact root of the issue. Nevertheless, I took a break from fruitless counteranimating to delve back into 3DE.
As far as I could tell, it looked completely fine. The camera was moving towards the stationary points as I’d expect it to, as I wished it would, in the Maya scene. Interacting with the points as it should with the geo.
That’s when I had a big moment of realization.
When I set up my scene, I had begun building my ground plane without snapping it to a point. I must have forgotten to do this, or else I’d assumed that if it looks correct in the camera view the camera will still orient correctly around it, but it suddenly made sense to me that although the scene geo looked right in the first frame, it could still be an incorrect distance to interact like the points were- for example, I could’ve placed it much too far away and simply made it large enough to look correct without actually being correct, thus when the camera moves closer, it is barely noticeable because the geo is much further away than the points.
On a hunch I hid my animation, deleted my ground plane and building geo and reconstructed it, snapped to a point in the scene this time.
When I hit play, it was a miracle: the camera moved around the scene correctly, the ground plane stayed kissing the edge of that building perfectly.
I reconstructed my building geo, making sure to extrude the edges of my ground plane this time to build the background set and reduce the mesh to as little faces as possible, my logic being that if I know the ground plane works there’s no point giving myself a second problem with complex geo elsewhere/ interacting on top of it.
And, blessedly, the geo and ground plane both moved correctly- that is to say, the camera moved around them correctly- in the scene.
The night had stretched on into the early morning hours, but I resolved to set my scene back up and put a test render into the farm to see if my plan had worked in the morning.
I resized my scene and moved Dana back into place.
She’s now surrounded by points. As I had mentioned in my notes, I’d been experiencing some crashing in Arnold Renderview, so I wasn’t sure whether it looked how I wanted. No matter, I’d put the render through and if it worked, I could re-adjust one last time before my final render.
The Next Day
And, after several days of frustration, it had worked. The scene was finally set up as it should be.
The excitement and relief I felt was immeasurable, and I liked the lighting setup even more than I did originally. Tasting an end to this leg of the project, and ready to move on to the next, I took just a couple notes for tweaking the scene to its final glory:
It took me all of thirty minutes to make these changes. Ready to embrace the product of my hard work, I changed the file name to Final_PinkDana render (or something of the sort) and chucked it into the farm.
However, so close to the end I could taste it, fortune did not smile on me, as I encountered an error with the farm: Deadline was marking jobs as complete, yet not saving the files to their output destination, despite the paths being correct and identical to the setup from last night. After several trial-and-error attempts to see if there was anything I could do on my end, I reached out to Luke for help.
Expect a glorious final render in a separate post later today.