Hey! No idea what happened to theOnion but you may want to try out Outliner.
what happened to theOnion?
HeadSmell
#4
Yea The onion is great :buttrock: I can’t work with out it
If only it could have nested layers…
jdrouse
#5
and faster redrawing of really big lists in big files. but yeah man. couldn’t work a day without it.
nmoser
#6
Thank you for your replies…
I’m looking for theOnion (or something similar) because I’ve been working on a scene with a significant amount of trees that makes the rendering very slow…
So, I figured out that if isolate the trees from everything else I could have faster renderings.
To do this I would still have to turn everything that is not tree as a mate object in order to capture the shades…
This is where theOnion comes in where I can apply a material override to a layer
As I am just a beginner on compositing I am not entirely shore about this.
HeadSmell
#10
are you using alpha mask for the leaves then?
because, vary cant handel transparency well, if thats the case your still going to hit high rendertimes
SoLiTuDe
#11
It can… you just have to code it yourself. 
How would you envision that for this version of the onion anyway? just different sized layer ‘buttons’ to indicate hierarchy? I don’t mind the groups at all – being able to turn off an entire group with one click is uber duber handy!
Just a heads up, the one that was (and will be availalbe again eventually) via the Blur Beta page is much closer to the one they actually use in production – which I believe includes some speed increases. It also includes multiple alternate materials + properties, and some FX Tools (most only work with the blur pipe, but are modifiyable), like being able to link the on/off of Thinking Particles Dyn Sets / PFlow Events to specific layers.
I want to modify it some more and possibly add renderable states to Thinking Particle Groups / Pflow, and also link it into specific operators so you can do alternate material setups with TP/Pflow (but who knows when I’ll find the time). I added the ability to store the TP group renderable flags to their render pass system though, which is super useful… I thought about storing it in the Onion, but it didn’t make sense at the time, with how their pipeline works anyway.
If anybody wants that stuff, since it’s not currently up, just let me know, and I’ll throw it on my web server… I have a semi-standalone version of that onion as well (tried to remove some of the dependencies on the other libraries), that I might try and get moving soon too.
HeadSmell
#12
Yea, now that i think about it, having more that one nested layer would require a whole UI change
But one more nested layer would be extremely helpful 
. I guess i was thinking of something like this:
But yea, more than one sub group get messy pretty fast…
Dude that sounds awesome :buttrock:defiantly would be interested in trying out
Cheers
SoLiTuDe
#13
Hmmmmm so subgroups? or nested layers within groups (which is what i was thinking would be more useful…) so like, would the nested group just minimize maximize with the parent group? What about inhereted visiblity and stuff? I was thinking that doing a photoshop style layer linking would be easy to implement… select the layer, have a link button next to each layer, click the link button next to any layers, and then they are ‘semi’-linked — so any time you turn one off you turn visibility off on the main one, the others also turn off, but you can still have separate material overrides, etc. ?
–I’ll upload it up soon… keep in mind it looks a bit different than Pauls version, but more or less acts the same… I’m pretty sure they added all the same things he did, along with all the other stuff they needed for production. …which reminds me of another thing I need to add, is an “Onoin States” section to easily save/load/switch between states, without having to use the pass manager.
HeadSmell
#14
This is where is gets a bit messy i guess, But I was imaging the sub group inharited thier parent’s properties untill you unlinked i guess.I dont know just a thought. The photshop type might be even better for this aswell.
You using RPM Ian?
SoLiTuDe
#15
Not really. Blur had their own, and they have our own here at Prime Focus too… I find the RPM workflow to be a bit tedious, but do love how powerful it is. I never had to use it in conjunction with tp… how well does it work? I’m remember there being some areas to add custom functions for it… I’m sure it can be extended to work with the onion as well, which would be cool. The thing that made blur’s pass manager so nice was that all it didn’t have to handle much since the onion did it all for you. It just captures the onion state, the render path, and a few other things… very simple and easy to use.
Hmm yeah, I’m not sure the ‘best’ way for this style interface for the nested layers/groups… if I get frisky, maybe i’ll try some stuff at some point.
JohnnyRandom
#16
haha, get frisky 
I’ll even send you a bottle of whiskey (or wine, or beer whatever turns your cranks 
)
HeadSmell
#18
So far I’ve just been using TP particles as groups and setting up thier capture sets, which worked good. though the onion and layered visabily sets is badnews bears…as RPM is constantly hiding and unhinding layers, switching between passes.
Haha, yea i defiantly pitch in for some beer for ya 
SoLiTuDe
#19
You mean as groups as objects? We’ve done that more than once, but I remember there being some cases where it was a crapload slower to render… or maybe the opposite, maybe it was faster haha I don’t remember. I’ll get RPM installed here next week, and play with it, maybe we can combine it with the onion… maybe not… haha… would be a nice combo though I’m sure.
HeadSmell
#20
yea particle groups as objects,though my scenes where fairly light, so i cant really comment on the render times.Man the Onion and RMP integration would be reshnefulous…
I love RPM, and Grant is supper good with support aswell. You can grab a demo version wich is just limited to two passes, if your feeling frisky…lol