Render dramas

I've been experiencing a lot of stress when it comes to rendering my animation....

Including doing renders and then having the computer accidently delete them and being unable to recover as I replaced the file by mistake. Oops.

This render has:

-Raytracing
-Global Illumination

-Ambient Occlusion

This render has:

-Raytracing
-Global Illumination

-Ambient Occlusion

-Anti Aliasing set to  3

The Anti Aliasing made a huge difference in smoothing out the jagged edges. However all of these settings take too long to render and I had to turn them off for my animations.

The more grass in a scene- the longer it took to render. I tried to set up most of my cameras so it wouldn't show to much grass in a scene. However I couldn't completely avoid this for some scenes. 

The physical sun and sky is a mental ray setting. I was having huge render problems. 7 minutes or more per frame. Ridiculous. There was no way I was going to be able to render in time. I thought it was the grass that was slowing me down but I was unwilling to part with it. I then figured out the the physical sun and sky was what was slowing my rendering times so much. I turned them off and had a huge improvement in comparison. Some scenes with a lot of grass showing still had very long render times.

I experimented with using noise as a blend tool to create a patchy effect. 

My model walks with the rigged legs - although not perfectly. I was running out of time to keep fiddling with my model - I had already wastes a lot of time rigging it and then soon after animating it. So the feet slide a little as it moves. I think it's fine however as the models feet are hidden by the grass and it's not hugely obvious  To do a a good rigged animation I think you need more time to study movements and have a good play with how you want the model to move. I just did very basic movement.

I was just playing with transferring paint effects to polys and the physical sun and sky system on mental way here.

Now to put all of my renders onto After Effects. Although I've rendered more frames than I need and will have to sort through them. Better to have too many than not enough which I was concerned about with my previous slow rendering time. But very pleased with the now faster renders.

I've been looking at music/sound for a while now. I will edit the track today also.