compositing...

[Crazy Homeless Guy]

i need some help.

 

i am rendering an animation, and the 3d palm trees are to much for the scene to get a decent render time. so i am planning on compositing the trees in AfterEffects.

 

i am going to render a pass with all of the palm trees turned off. this will be my base pass. then i am going to render a pass with the trees turned on, using scanline, and all other materials set to create an alpha channel.

 

what i am trying to figure out is if i can set the ground material to 'catch' the shadow of the palm. ...any ideas?

 

i am not to worried about not having the reflection of the palms in the scene, although they would be nice, i can't afford the render time right now. this is a very quick turn around, but the render time is killing me.

 

without the palms in the scene i am getting around 20-25 minutes a frame, and the anti-aliasing is not even set that high. with the palms, it shoots up. the anit-aliasing on the palm frawns is what is killing me time wise.

 

...any ideas?

[Crazy Homeless Guy]

..also, i am using max 8, and vray 1.47 or whatever, aftereffects 4. i also have combustion 2 available, but don't really know what i am doing with it.

[Ernest Burden III]

Can you selectively turn off the AA for the palms? That may not be enough time savings, but it would save the multi-pass and the comping time later.

 

Is there a way to easily swap in a proxy object for the palms--you could put a poly with a map of a palm and have it cast shadows and be seen in reflection but not by camera.

[Crazy Homeless Guy]

i think you are on to something. i have the palms on their own layer, so first i am going to try to make that layer not seen by the camera. they won't render, but will still cast shadow. the shadows may still be enough to slow it down with the frawns.

 

these are also onyx trees, so maybe i can switch them out with little to no work.

 

setting up a second pass for just the palms will be really fast, so i am not to worried about that. besides, i would like to learn to composit a little better.

[pipjor]

maybe make a new pass "shadow pass" and apply matte shadow to the ground material which would contain only shadow from the palms???

[Ernest Burden III]

i think you are on to something. i have the palms on their own layer, so first i am going to try to make that layer not seen by the camera. they won't render, but will still cast shadow. the shadows may still be enough to slow it down with the frawns.

 

Obviously force the AA off for that, you don't need it to reflect or shadow. You might even want to make them less than 100 opaque to help with the shadows and reflections.

 

Then render the palms pass with the AA, and matting for the rest.

[tony3di]

Hello Travis.

 

Maybe you want to try my way. This is what i normally would do:

Just do the animation without the trees and save it, then delete everything and just leave the ground objects. Change its material to a matte/shadow material and tick receive shadows and affect alpha. Next get your saved animation and use it as the environment background, unhide trees and render.

Your background animation will get the trees and its shadows printed in.

Sorry for bad English.

 

Cheers

 

Tony

[Crazy Homeless Guy]

Obviously force the AA off for that, you don't need it to reflect or shadow. You might even want to make them less than 100 opaque to help with the shadows and reflections.

 

Then render the palms pass with the AA, and matting for the rest.

 

I am not sure how to do this in Max, or if you can do this in Max. My previous test of hiding the trees only knocked 10 minutes off the rendering time. Which leaves the rendering time still incredibly high. way to high for this scene.

 

The attached image is in no way final, I still adjusting colors, and obviously rendering time. The model was built with hundreds of control joints and reveals. It really needs the AA upped on the building to show the level of detail.

 

Maybe you want to try my way. This is what i normally would do:

Just do the animation without the trees and save it, then delete everything and just leave the ground objects. Change its material to a matte/shadow material and tick receive shadows and affect alpha. Next get your saved animation and use it as the environment background, unhide trees and render.

 

Tony, This sounds like what I had originally planned on doing, but I can't get the alpha to work for the shadow. I was using playing around with a matte/shadow, and I can create objects that render as part of the alpha channel, but I can't seem to make my shadows render as part of the alpha channel.

[Crazy Homeless Guy]

ok, i figured out how to render an alpha shadow pass using vray. so that should take care of my problems for the most part, except I still probably won't have reflections for the palm's.

 

compositing will be a pain, but that is something I want to get better at.

[Ernest Burden III]

That test looks great. But perhaps you can make the context more gray, maybe even a warm or cool gray, and darken the grass. That should allow your subject to pop more. The glass looks nice. The one oddity is the paving--there's a 1/4 circle at the corners, but the one is pushed back so its no longer part of the same circle. Its a distraction since it makes no sense.