ChrisNicholls
05-15-2009, 01:03 PM
Hi guys,
So here's what I'm trying to do in simple terms. I have a floor, a box and a ball. The ball will be animated rolling across the floor.
I want:
11 separate animations:
1A - The AO of the floor - possibly could be replace by a bake.
1B - The Shadows of the floor
1C - The diffuse of the floor
1D - The colour of the floor
2A - The Shadows of the box
2B - The diffuse of the box
2C - The colour of the box
3A - The Shadows of the ball
3B - The diffuse of the ball
3C - The colour of the ball
3D - The AO of the ball
Then pull each one into After Effects and have the ability to manipulate each one.
Here's what I'm doing and the problems I'm having, any help would be greatly appreciated: i have 3 render scenes set up. The camera and light is copied into each layer and each render scene renders a single layer.
Render Scene 1, layer 1: has a floor with the ball and box. The ball and box have a material that only casts shadow for AO calculations, outputs 1A, 1B, 1C, 1D. We have the passes containing only the floor, where the box and ball are replaced with alpha pixels, it's surrounding shadow is rendered. This is perfect.
Render Scene 2, layer 2: has the box. The box has it's AO baked and wrapped with the texture.
Render Scene 3, layer 3: has the ball. The ball does not have it's AO wrapped since it rolls.
The problems I'm having:
The compositor won't render all render scenes, I have to manually choose the render scene 1 and view layer 1 and then hit animate, then I have to wait til that finishes and click on render scene 2 and view layer 2 manually and then hit animate etc etc. Is there a way to get the compositor to render all scenes that are ticked as active render scenes? Also consider my nodes are set up to treat each render scene separately, so I have 3 bunches of nodes for each scene outputting the 3 different passes. My node setup consists of 3 seperate renderimage scene inputs that have 4 additional file outputs. the compositor output is blank because I don't need the compositor result, just the file_outputs. It's important to note that the 3 different render scenes, their node set-ups are totaly separate, not linked in any way.
Also, is there a way I can calculated the balls AO against the floor with rendering the floor at all? I know I can tell the floor to cast only shadow and this way would work, but the flaw is, the floor casts shadow against itself in places such as corners so when you output the ball render pass you get the ball fine but also hints of shadow of the background which effects composition when you play around with colour balance etc
So to sum up my two main questions:
1. How do I hit the button animate and have blender animate all the active render scenes for each frame
2. How do I render the ball in the scene to contain the AO values of the full scene without including AO values of the other objects that are used to calculate the AO on the ball.
I know this is quite a complex set-up, but it's the only way I can think of to get all the animation passes I need.
If anyone has answers excellent, if anyone has other suggestions or think that I'm overkilling aspects of the process, please voice your opinion. Or maybe you need more infor or screenshots.
Hope to hear from you guys.
Cheers,
Chris
So here's what I'm trying to do in simple terms. I have a floor, a box and a ball. The ball will be animated rolling across the floor.
I want:
11 separate animations:
1A - The AO of the floor - possibly could be replace by a bake.
1B - The Shadows of the floor
1C - The diffuse of the floor
1D - The colour of the floor
2A - The Shadows of the box
2B - The diffuse of the box
2C - The colour of the box
3A - The Shadows of the ball
3B - The diffuse of the ball
3C - The colour of the ball
3D - The AO of the ball
Then pull each one into After Effects and have the ability to manipulate each one.
Here's what I'm doing and the problems I'm having, any help would be greatly appreciated: i have 3 render scenes set up. The camera and light is copied into each layer and each render scene renders a single layer.
Render Scene 1, layer 1: has a floor with the ball and box. The ball and box have a material that only casts shadow for AO calculations, outputs 1A, 1B, 1C, 1D. We have the passes containing only the floor, where the box and ball are replaced with alpha pixels, it's surrounding shadow is rendered. This is perfect.
Render Scene 2, layer 2: has the box. The box has it's AO baked and wrapped with the texture.
Render Scene 3, layer 3: has the ball. The ball does not have it's AO wrapped since it rolls.
The problems I'm having:
The compositor won't render all render scenes, I have to manually choose the render scene 1 and view layer 1 and then hit animate, then I have to wait til that finishes and click on render scene 2 and view layer 2 manually and then hit animate etc etc. Is there a way to get the compositor to render all scenes that are ticked as active render scenes? Also consider my nodes are set up to treat each render scene separately, so I have 3 bunches of nodes for each scene outputting the 3 different passes. My node setup consists of 3 seperate renderimage scene inputs that have 4 additional file outputs. the compositor output is blank because I don't need the compositor result, just the file_outputs. It's important to note that the 3 different render scenes, their node set-ups are totaly separate, not linked in any way.
Also, is there a way I can calculated the balls AO against the floor with rendering the floor at all? I know I can tell the floor to cast only shadow and this way would work, but the flaw is, the floor casts shadow against itself in places such as corners so when you output the ball render pass you get the ball fine but also hints of shadow of the background which effects composition when you play around with colour balance etc
So to sum up my two main questions:
1. How do I hit the button animate and have blender animate all the active render scenes for each frame
2. How do I render the ball in the scene to contain the AO values of the full scene without including AO values of the other objects that are used to calculate the AO on the ball.
I know this is quite a complex set-up, but it's the only way I can think of to get all the animation passes I need.
If anyone has answers excellent, if anyone has other suggestions or think that I'm overkilling aspects of the process, please voice your opinion. Or maybe you need more infor or screenshots.
Hope to hear from you guys.
Cheers,
Chris