120 rendering stills

[glorybound]

I have a curtain that needs to be rendered out 120 times, all different curtain fabrics. How can I approach this? I can render out just the curtain and past it in PS, but even that sounds like a nightmare task.

[PIXELBOX_SRO]

How about vray switch material?

[glorybound]

I never hear of it. I'll look it up.

[samuel_bubat]

Make a numbered Sequence of the 120 textures. Load it as ifl and render an animation of 120 frames.

[Vizioen]

I just thought of this and it literally takes 1 minute to setup. This is only when you need changes in your diffuse slot by the way. If you need different reflections or refractions or anything else, you'd have to do it some other way. (Switch Mtl or similar)

- Apply a material modifier to your curtain.
- Animate this modifier (linearly, because by default there will be some easing on the animation curve) so the material ID changes incrementally by 1 for each frame. So if you have 175 fabrics you need to animate them till frame 174 (if you start from 0).
- In the diffuse of your fabric material, put a CoronaMultiMap (I know, but it works, I use it a lot with Vray) in the diffuse slot and load in all your textures. Set the mode to material ID.
- Render and save the animation (either with render mask > object selection or something), so you don't need to render the rest again and again. But I can see the reflection in your floor so that probably won't be an option .

edit: Or you can go even easier like Samuel suggested, lol damn it I should've thought of that

[glorybound]

I told them that as long as reflections don't matter I only have to render the curtain. They agreed that reflection isn't an issue. I'll give it a go. Thanks for the help.

[Morne]

you can set material reflection (for the floor for example) to affect all channels. Then your multimatte curtain mask will inlcude the curtain, as well as the reflection in the floor and you can adjust both at same time.

You can use the VMC script for example to set that setting on all reflection for all materials, then you'll have your mask. There's other things to consider also like GI etc, but even without that and just with the reflection and beauty mask in one, should already bring you a long way to cheat in post

[dgruwier]

Just one more option to stack onto the pile:
You can also render the entire scene once with a black material on the curtain, then render all the curtain variations with everything else set to matte reflections (using the animated texture trick from before). Then add them together in post. That way you only have to render the full scene once, but you should still get good integration with reflections and all that good stuff.

[glorybound]

I have been avoiding this, but I'll have to tackle it soon, it is due Monday.

[M.Max]

just to add another option for you .you might try to render the UV pass and do all the iterations in compositing .
If you have access to Aftereffect you can get ReMap plugin it is not free but it is cheap and for this kind of work it's worth it imo .
check this video I did few months to test the same workflow in Fstrom.

In Vray you have more control as you can render Raw passes , bump normal pass ..etc
(Please someone correct me here)
I'm not sure but Fusion have free version that might do that out-of-the -box ..it's been years since I've used Fusion so I'm not sure if that's available in the free version and what's the limitation.

[glorybound]

That looks interesting. What’s the learning curve? I do have after effect.

[M.Max]

For the plugin it is really easy ..just plug the texture in there and you are ready to go ..you will get something like Diffuse filter pass and all what you have to do is to rebuild the beauty pass using the other passes that you have rendered .
it is simple setup but u still need to know some basics of multi-pass compositing .. If you want to avoid all that you might ask someone to build that setup for you .
Also one more point . as you are doing the composting in aftereffect you will -most probably- do the color correction tone-mapping ..etc in there too so it depends on how far you usually push your renders you need to test that first and see if aftereffect tools will be enough for you .
samuel_bubat solution looks good if you have the render power to it but just make sure the uv scale is correct for each frame (if the client sent textures that varied in scale you will need to keyframe the uv tiling ).

[rusteberg]

Make a numbered Sequence of the 120 textures. Load it as ifl and render an animation of 120 frames.

#winning : )

[glorybound]

Yeah, not! They told me that they have nice tileable and seamless patterns. These are poorly scanned pieces of cloth that are stretched in all directions with awful and uneven lighting. One by one I have to make a texture I can use! 9 hours later I have 20 done.

[JezUK]

Bobby,

You have these 120 textures ready, right ?

Why not use something like the Reindeer plug-in ? That'd be perfect for this situation I'd have thought.