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View Full Version : Rendering / Compositing Advice Please

grantmoore3d
08-21-2007, 03:10 PM
I'm sorry for such a generic thread, but I'm hoping some of your experience and advice can help me decide on a workflow that will work for me. First off, I am using Maya to do my animations, MentalRay for rendering primarily, and can use either Adobe Premiere or After Effects to do the compositing (learning both at the moment). Right now, I'm doing a project to teach myself everything needed to go from modeling right to final post processing in an effort to learn more and to get a solid workflow ready for an animated short I've been wanting to do.

My question is this : What can be done to speed up rendering, maintain a high quality final product, and allow for the most versatility. I understand the concept of rending out a colour layer, shadow, etc... but are there any other options available to me?

For example, I want to have motion blur and depth bluring, but am unsure of how to do these without having to render an hour per frame (on a 2X dual 2.2Ghz machine).

So, if any of you could give me an idea of how you would render out something like this and what you typically do with the various layers afterwards, it would be of great help to me in deciding which path to take!

Thanks in advance!
wesleygh
08-22-2007, 12:16 AM
Grant,

Personally, I would render out in passes like you stated. Most of what I've done have included: diffuse pass, specular, shadow, occlussion, and motion blur if needed. As far as speeding up your renders, what you need to do is go into your MentalRay settings and just tweak them out. One of the things that will speed it up is your contrast settings in the renderer and your filter settings. When rendering occ. passes, you need to check your sample settings in your shader. The higher the samples, the crisper the output will be but the longer it will take to render. For motion blur rendering, if possible, stick to 2D motion blur. If you need to render 3D motion blur, try to keep the settings as low as possible to avoid out of memory errors and crashes. When it comes time to comp it all together, I personally use Shake and Nuke. I find node-based compositing much easier, especially with render passes and such for masking etc. If you can't get ahold of Shake or Nuke, look for another alternative. I can't offer much in the way of advice for AfterEffects as I don't use it a whole lot.

Wes
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08-22-2007, 12:16 AM
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