How long does it take to prep a shot for Lighting?

[Andrew W]

This is a bit of a "How long is a piece of string?" question. i.e. it depends on the shot. It also depends on the pipeline. If you're using just regular CG lights then you might see if anyone else has lit a similar set-up and if so use their lighting rig as a basis. If you're using an image based lighting pipeline then there may be time spent prepping the maps, making twaeks so they match the graded plate etc etc.

To cut this short, it's an impossible question to answer. The shortest time I've spent lighting one shot for a feature is about an hour start to finish and the longest time (including waiting for client revisions and then making the tweaks again and again) is about 8 months. In fact this is where most of the time is spent. You'll do some lighting, render it and then you enter the world of iterative revisions based either on supervisor's comments or client feedback.

I think your question may be a lilttle broad to get any useful answers I'm afraid.

Andrew

[lazzhar]

I like what someone said about programing : " It's 20% writing the code and 80% debugging"

And I bet he's right, the tweaking takes all the time. Same thing for lighting.

[MDuffy]

I certainly understand that lighting a shot can take an unknown amount of time, especially when revisions are considered.

I guess I'm more curious about the time it takes to prep a shot after it has been animated (bringing in the full set, culling, exporting any geometry into a form the renderer can use, etc.), and how long it takes to submit the shot to the renderfarm after lighting is complete (building and attaching shadow maps, prepping geometry for the renderer, assembling all the assets required for rendering, breaking a heavy shot into layers that will be comped later, actually putting the shot onto the renderfarm, etc.) Anyone have insight on these processes?

So can you just load a shot from animation and start lighting it directly? When you are done lighting, do you just press a button or two in order to submit it to the renderfarm? How do you know when your shot is done on the farm?

Thanks for any info,
Michael Duffy

[gerardo]

936.42 minutes exactly :rolleyes:








Maybe you want to listen something like that, but that also depends on the complexity of the shot and many factors that will influence the procedures and resources that you choose to face the project :)


Best Regards


Gerardo

[rendermaniac]

It seems like you are asking more of a TD/setup question.

Sure you can take a scene directly from the animator, put a few lights in and hit render. I can guarentee 90% of the time it will not come out right first time though.

For a start it will take forever to render, probably will not have the right shaders/textures (which is a whole different thread...). Not to mention weird renderer "features".

The actual lighting part is the quickest (I was going to say easiest, but that wouldn't be true). Getting a pretty image on screen that the client is happy with and in a reasonable amount of time is a whole different ball game.

Usually the lighting, animation, materials and even geometry can change based on client feedback which adds an extra layer to the process.

This is why it is essential to have a good pipeline from the start and shots can go quickly and smoothly. Bad pipeline and you are in for a world of pain.

Simon

[MDuffy]

I know there's no exact answer to the number of minutes something takes.

The reason I'm asking is that I'm getting ready to implement a pipeline where shots are animated and lit in Maya, and then exported to Renderman for rendering. But I've heard rumors from the industry that it can take some studios an entire day to prep a shot coming out of animation before it can be lit. And I've heard rumors of it taking up to two hours of work to submit a shot to the renderfarm after the lighting is done. These numbers boggle the mind, but I haven't implemented a Renderman based pipeline before so I can't quite figure out what is taking up all that time. I'm just trying to find out if anyone is aware of any pitfalls or time-sinks in these processes that I'm not aware of. In my mind, it should take 5-10 minutes to move a shot from animation to lighting (not including simulation of hair, cloth, etc.), and 5-10 minutes to submit a shot once it is finished being lit. Does this sound reasonable to you? Is it the simulation phase which eats up so much time between animation and lighting? Let's say for a ballpark reference I'm thinking of shots with about the complexity of something in Shrek.

Thanks for any info,
Michael Duffy

[Andrew W]

To render a scene in RenderMan you generally need to create a RIB file for each frame, maybe more than one. Depending on the complexity of geometry that you need to write out to RIB, this can take a very long time, often many minutes per frame if not more. Investigate RIB archives and delayed RIB archives as these can save you a lot of time.

Also be aware that some RIB files can be very big even if in gzipped binary format. So there is a lot of IO traffic on the network to consider...

Something of the complexity of Shrek could take hours just to export to RIB and that's before you begin the actual rendering process. I've had RIB of just a few characters (quite complex characters but nothing fancy in terms of environment) on a film which took an hour to write out, per frame, and then the render begins. If you're new to RenderMan/PRMan I'd suggest doing some serious research as you're diving into seriously deep water if you aren't careful.

Andrew

[Flinch]

Originally posted by Andrew W
If you're new to RenderMan/PRMan I'd suggest doing some serious research as you're diving into seriously deep water if you aren't careful.

Andrew


You should take this sentence seriously.

In my last company we did mostly stuff for tv (so mostly pal and sometimes hdtv), so by far not such complex things like shrek. We also built a renderman pipeline with maya from scratch and it took some time until it really worked well and we solved every bottleneck and were able to scale the whole renderfarm in a short time if needed. It's really not that simple to just buy some pc's from the next supermarket, stick them together in a network, setup your renderman-renderer of choice and hit render and think your job will be finished in 1/20 the time cause you have 20 boxes now. In the end we had sort of 2 seperated renderfarms, one only for generating the ribs and another one for rendering the actual frame.

Setting up a scene to be ready for Lighting/Rendering doesn't need to take that much time at all. It just depends on what sort of job you're doing. When you're doing an animated series for example and you know from the beginning that there will be a fixed amount of sets and characters you can do a lot of work before the scenes even get animated. So you can fully light a scene and prepare it in a way that one animation is done you just have to check if the shot is ok and maybe adjust the lighting a little bit or include things which were added during the show. This way you can cut down the time for lighting/rendering a shot to a minimum. But as said before it all depends on what work you're doing and also depends on the time you've invested in planning the project and optimizing the flow from modelling-texturing-animating-lighting-rendering.


-Flinch

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