How to..masterplan

[olitech]

embrace the power of the dark side...

Not if I have anything to do with it...


haha get it... dark side.. daforce.. the force...therefore I combat the dark side .... ah forget it.

oh, i Get It alright daForce...but you my friend, are the last of that ancient religion You are a rebel traitor and a spy!

[DaForce]

Ahhhh (homer scream) my secret is out.

[olitech]

Ahhhh (homer scream) my secret is out.

oooooooh.... daForce is strong in this one (<@>)

=]

[DaForce]

See I used my powers of the force to completely derail this thread



Fear me

[jhiler]

We tend to do a lot of comping of entourage. Usually our models get real geometry intensive so that when we try to do trees, people, cars things start to blow up. So as a habit (not necessarily a good one) we've started putting trees, cars, people and other misc items into a seperate file and comping it in through Premiere, Combustion or After Effects.

If at all possible I try to keep everything in one render though. A lot of times it just doesn't work for us though.

[Giovanni]

yes, but when you render the cars/people/trees pass, you still need all the other geometry matted out, correct? So, you are still sending the whole geometry scene to MAX.
I am wondering if it will save RAM as compared to a one pass rendering...


thank you

regards

gio

[jhiler]

Sorry for not really answering that. yes we do bring in most of the geometry and add the Matte/Shadow material to the geometry that blocks anything we want to see. In some cases we are able to bring in minimal geometry because not much of the entourage was occluded..

Rendering the entourage seperate would sometimes be twice (but not always) the render time, but we had our scenes to the point that we were unable to render the scene with entourage (MAX would crash when rendering) so we had to do it seperately and it didn't cause any problems, just added time.

I don't have any examples because it has been a while since I've had to do this.

[olitech]

I am wondering if it will save RAM as compared to a one pass rendering...

Theoretically, it shouldn't have to load those (matted out) bitmaps...but...i'm just shooting from the hip here...perhaps someone with more knowledge could answer this.
(daForce...where r u when we need you! *shakes fists*)

...or Gio..just do a test...monitor the ram usage one-shot..compared to the matted one...and let us know!

[DaForce]

*in a puff of smoke DaForce appears*

You rang?

*they all look at DaForce and think "what a showman"*

But seriously,

Matting things out will save RAM, and alot of it me thinks. Because you wont be loading up GI info, materials...etc..etc.. for all the blocked geometry.
But you have to do more passes... so yeah... might very well take a fair bit longer in terms of total render time but atleast you will be able to render right

But in saying all that I dont have as much experience in that area as I am sure some others do. So anyone please correct me if im offtrack.

[gilpo]

I could be doing something wrong, but we've found rendering passes takes WAY more time than just doing it all at once.

We proxy EVERYTHING out because our scenes are usually 50 million + polys.

We render buildings and terrain first. Then landscaping. Then site accessories (benches, lights, posed people, anything else that doesn't move). And then animation is on the last pass.

The reason it takes longer is because you still have to have all the geometry in the file for occlusion purposes as well as casting shadows and other gi onto the objects in the current pass. So, in effect, you are calculating the same geometry multiple times.

The main reason we do it like that is because we only have 2.5 people in our 3d dept and this allows us to finish site and buildings and start rendering while we work on landscaping and so forth.

The other benefit for us is that we make lots of little mistakes-a lot of which can be fixed in post or by re-rendering a few frames here and there.


If someone has a better idea/way of doing this, I'd be ecstatic to hear it!

Good luck!

[DaForce]

yeah taking the "comping" route will be longer.. without a doubt.

The other thing to note is that by proxying out everything your rendertimes will be 2 or 3 times longer than if you didnt. But it also means that you can probabaly render your scene where you could previously.
So i guess you gotta take the good with the bad

[olitech]

We proxy EVERYTHING out because our scenes are usually 50 million + polys.

Holy sh**!
i'd love to see that!

Here's another one...If we do have to matte/comp, render the terrain/buildings or whatever...use the rendered frames as screen background. When you render the next layers (people, cars or whatever) you won't have to deal with the halo-ing that can often appear around the geometry...this way you won't have to choke the moving objects or whatever it is...it's like comping within max.

[olitech]

*in a puff of smoke DaForce appears*

You rang?

*they all look at DaForce and think "what a showman"*

must be that uncanny Australian saavy

[DaForce]

indeed

[gilpo]

Holy sh**!
i'd love to see that!

Here's another one...If we do have to matte/comp, render the terrain/buildings or whatever...use the rendered frames as screen background. When you render the next layers (people, cars or whatever) you won't have to deal with the halo-ing that can often appear around the geometry...this way you won't have to choke the moving objects or whatever it is...it's like comping within max.

Heh, I'm too scared to post images. Don't think my ego could take the abuse of this forum. We are always on tight deadlines and our clients don't understand GI noise so all our renders are a little splotchy. We've yet to hear a comment or a complaint from a client. There are no other 3d companies in the area so they think everything we do looks like a photograph (when we know it doesn't).

We use After Effects to comp and we save all our frames as pre-multiplied tgas. We render against a black environment. We've never had an issue with halo-ing. But, that is a good solution if your mileage varies from ours.