Will Combustion 4 work well with Maya and Lightwave

#1

I am very interested in purchasing the new Combustion 4.0 but want to know if it will work well with Maya or Lightwave. I would guess as long as the animation is an mpeg or avi file combustion would treat it as any of file. Has anybody used Combustion with either program. Thanks

#2

Yes, it will! As long as you work with image-sequences (tifs or tgas) an alphas, it works. It doesn’t work with rpfs (for doing depth of field, object base colorcorrection, 3D-fog…), but to be honest, depth of field and 3D-Fog doesn’t really work with rpfs coming from max either. But for all the standard stuff, it doesn’t matter whether the images come from photoshop, max, maya, lightwave, your digicam, or whatever!

Don’t try to feed a mpeg into your compositingsoftware if there is a way around, as it is compressed already, you wont get good results!

#3

how about avi

#4

Generally you could import any avi file, but the codec has to installed on that system.
Keep in mind that importing an animation as DV avi file is possible, but it is already compressed. Things like divx are not suitable for a broadcast production.
Try rendering to image sequences. If you want to network render, almost every 3d package it is limited to image sequence rendering, too.

In combustion 4 there is a new operator called “gbuffer builder”.
With that it is possible to combine any RGB sequence with another Zdepth sequence to a “virtual rpf”, so depth of field could be done in combustion. With that it does not matter from which 3d package it is rendered. The operator lets you choose to extract z depth by “luminance value” or “alpha”.

#5

The big advantage of image sequences is that you can store the alpha in it, so you can for ex. change the sky or background in post! You can’t do that with mpeg or avi!

#6

Well… rendering separate passes would be an exception. (Don’t know how it is in other apps, but at least in Max, you can render out a video file of your alpha channel at the same time as your main render).
But yeah… Stick with image sequences, unless you have a very good reason to not use them.

#7

just what vormav said.

even in cinema4d u can render out alpha within a movie file. render as quicktime, millions of colors +… that’s it.

#8

Actually the big advantage of an image sequence is that if your render crashes you can pickup where it left off. You cannot pick up on a video file. Also depending on your format you can use lossless compression meaning that you lose no image quality but the file size is reduced. Quicktime Animation at 100% is suppose to be lossless, but in reality you will get some image quality compression. Then there is the whole colorspace options tiff, openexr, and rpf support 8, 16, 32, and float color spaces. Video files usually only support 8 bit and if you purchase a special codec you may get 10 or 12 bit color spaces.

-Eric

#9

Hi There,

I use C3 to comp all of my Lightwave stuff and I always render out as image sequences to put into C3 as it’s always better if you crash and If you need a hold on the front you can just grab in a frame likewise if you have a glitch it’s easier to patch.
As with any compositor you should look around at the plugins that are available as you can really enhance your 3d or anything you shoot film draw or animate for that matter by the appropriate use of some of the great plugins that are available. Some things that might slow up a 3d render big time might be a snip to do in C3/4.
Download the c4 demo and tryout the Genarts sapphire plugs demo and the trapcode demos
and have fun!
There are a host of reasons why I like C3, but as everyone is different and does different sorts of work your favourite thing might be something I would rarely use. So try before you buy!

regards

paul

#10

Combustion 4 uses .IFF as it’s native file format. This means that all channels link seemlessly from Maya Render to Combustion. Even Multipass/Motionblured footage and z Depth.

Combustion works much better than AE for Maya composites.

#11

In lightwave u can always output “Extended RLA” files if u render a sequence and in Combustion add 3D-blur and other 3D non-RPFS plugins.

In LW under Effects -> Processing -> Add Filter -> Extended RLA Export
I have used “extended RLA export” on project with VERY short deadlines and it has work´t great…but nothing beats old fashion DOF in LW if u got time for it.

Extended RLA Export supports, Z-Depth, Material Buffer, ObjectID Buffer, Normal Buffer and TextureUV Buffer.

#12

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