This submission has been difficult to achieve. My initial tests with Viper were rather promising as they generated perfectly rendered short and basic animations.
However, when it came time to create the final render, Viper, for whatever reason, was unable to path the files correctly. I tried many ways to rectify this behaviour. My initial thoughts were that I had not correctly plugged in the textures to the sourceimages folder, but this made little sense considering some aspects of the scene were able to be processed correctly.
This issue affected more than just my own hand-built textures, as it would also incorrectly path Maya / Arnold built in materials such as Lamberts, AiStandardSurfaces and StandardSurfaces.
Between myself and two members of the faculty (they really tried to fix this), we were unable to resolve the issue in a timely manner and I was forced to render the animation out through GPU rendering. GPU rendering is substantially faster than a standard CPU render, but lacks many of the quality aspects CPU can offer, such as proper light bounce calculations, volumetric fog and others.
After all of my assignments are done, I will try and get this animation rendered properly using Viper and document all, if any, progress to forward on to the technical support team to help fix whatever these issues may be. The final render quality is therefore lacking, and some aspects of the animation are quite poor.
I will tweak the appearance of the skeleton and fix some of the frames as it has a very Jason and the Argonaughts aesthetic to it, but in retrospect it does appear as if I am paying homage to the original Evil Dead Trilogy which used stop motion animation to bring some of its creations to life.
This project has been tiring, but I feel as if I have developed my storytelling, animation, and modelling skills substantially and I am looking forward to seeing what I create next.
