Rendering the particles has been a bit of a shepherding experience – each of the glyphs has had its own set of problems. For example, the G major glyph seems to have caused some major slowing down of my system to the extent that I have had to break up the glyph further into separate nurbs particle, poly particle and shell particle scenes just to be able to render them out. Most of these scenes have demanded that I cache out the particles beforehand, so the whole job of getting the particles rendered is an onerous process.
On the other hand, there is no way that I would have been able to run these thought the render farm at University – the caches for the particles would have been enormous – plus the fact that if something went wrong during the render, I wouldn’t be able to stop it and fix the problem before resuming, it could have been a disaster! Hopefully, I will be finished rendering the particles out by the end of this week, then I can look to rendering the glyph geometry through the render farm.
Particle Settings – for my own future reference – I have been setting the playback speed to 0.2 (play each frame max playback 25fps) with the over sample rate set to 5. This was recommended by the fireworks tutorials I had gone through before for smoother particle results.
Mental Ray with Z-Depth
J.J. McGowan 