Sorry about delays, I haven't been feeling very motivated lately. Besides the heavy work load from other classes and digging a hole way too big to fill, I have already begun the trend of hating my thesis. Everything about it annoys me, and I almost want to forget about it entirely and come back to it at the start of next semester.

But I can't. I can't allow myself to fall behind like that. After having a conversation with Meghdad today about what's been going on, he reassured me that this crisis happens to all 3D and design personnel. If I don't hate my project by the end, I clearly haven't put in enough time and effort for it.

And so I push on. Tonight, after my classes finished, I, with the help of my friend, Tom, setup distributed rendering with V-Ray in Maya. After a couple hours and some in-depth testing and analysis, the service finally works with very few problems.

In this image, you can see the separate nodes working together to render the final image. It contained 12 passes and 3 render layers, all composited within Maya. At this point, about 5 min have passed.

This is the final image, with all the rendering complete. All the shadows, lights, reflections, AO, GI, etc. have been added. The total time, 9m 57.2s (as seen on the bottom of the image), a serious improvement from a 22m render prior to using distributed rendering (DR). Though this scene isn't my thesis (it was from a group project earlier this semester), it is a nice test for covering the DR bases. This can definitely be utilized in the very near future.