The two go hand in hand, in real life: bright highlights bloom when seen through a lens.
A lot, or a little, depends entirely on the intensity and the lens, ofc.
As a comper myself I would say the opposite. Don’t give me aliased trash I have to wrestle with to make look halfway decent
Again, this is the advantage of a comper that knows rendering and knows where the best place to tweak something is, and a CGI team that knows comping. Not every problem is best solved in post. We often find ourselves re-rendering things with softer filters to get them closer to the end sharpness level. Everything is comped at at least 4k or 5k and then scaled down to whatever the final delivery is.
Yeah, different houses approach things in different ways. We get the best results getting the renders as close as possible to begin with, but not if something is easier/faster in the post. For us, we found sticking with arbitrary rules to make things absurdly sharp and render one thousand passes typically leads to more work and a lower quality end result. I know lots of places still do that, though. Subtleties of lighting seem better captured making the surfaces correctly, rather than trying to clean them up in post.
I am a comper too, or rather have been (with some high-level, high-stress work done.), before I chose LnR as a specialisation, around 12 years ago (ofc i still “comp” these days. I’m just not hired for one.).
The thing is that i do not see LnR as anything else than a SERVICE to comp, you see.
This tends to piss my fellow lighters off a bit, but tends to make the compers quite happy.
Indeed, there is a fine line between doing it right in 3d and doing it right in post (or “fixing” it, as you put it.), and that’s the one i’m threading here.
I abhor the higher resolution rendering of beauty passes and elements in a time and age where we have, per bucket, resolutions 64 times that of the pixel (say, adaptive subdivision with a max of 3), although rendering double resolution IS necessary for some DATA pass (ie. anything which ends up being non-anti-aliased), as it’s a mistake, if it was doable, to anti-alias a Z, velocity, or PPos pass, while we all want nice, soft masks to work with.
In that type of scenario, the only way out is to render at least double res (but hey, lights and shaders off. who cares.), so that exact values can be selected before the down-scaling provides for gross AA.
LnR has one role, in my personal opinion, and that is to get shaders, and lights, as close to the real counterparts as the technology allows.
Rendering double to correct for wrong lighting and wrong shading (say, a directly visible light glinting away on a too reflective surface) is as close to madness, to my eyes, as going around one’s own house with a baseball bat trying to hit a fly.
Nor the fix for such mistakes ought to be a burden to Post.
It will get better, in time, and already these days good advancements are being made in the shaders’ and lights’ department, both within softwares and in the broader physical sciences, so that it’s easy to recover the correct data for both materials and lights, which alone cuts down old-school type of issues a lot.
But hey, this is how i tackle my role, not how it ought to be done.
My own opinions change as i learn new approaches, but so far, so good: with VRay, or rMan, or whathaveyounot, alone, with ten, or 50 lighters to TD for (in which case, good luck trying to get good stuff out of every one of them…).
My whole point of this little example was to show that unless you want to mess with things a lot int he post, and know a lot of tricks for doing so, you might be better off “just” using an image filter!
And my whole point was very close to yours as far as the argument’s premises go, just that the conclusion is opposite because of a host of other factors which I have outlined.
BTW, I hope I am not coming across as argumentative. Not my goal. I enjoy your insight, and that of Neilg and others on this board. I just like to share info and improve my knowledge while helping others based on my experiences. There is no RIGHT way to do anything.
You ARE coming across as argumentative, and in the best possible way one could intend the meaning of the word.
We’re not trying to rationalise convictions, we’re debating best practices with a critical approach, and a slew of supporting evidence, from both sides.
“Right” , just as “wrong” are circumstantial terms, and quite flimsy, when taken into specific, and different from the originals, contexts.
Bring it on, if it’s synthesis we are looking for, we’re getting there.
