Populate people for Renderfarm

[Stephen Hughes]

Hi Guys,

 

Bit of a specific query here. I'm rendering an animation using 3dsmax's 'populate' people. But by default the people look really bright & vibrant. Anyway, what I do to counter this is to give all the people objects a black diffuse colour, and change the diffuse multiplier down from 100 to 20. This makes the objects darker, more saturated, and look less eye-catching in the scenes.......

However......

I'm sending the scene to a renderfarm and because max generates the textures every time the scene is opened on a new computer, the texture edits are lost when the renderfarm opens it, and so when the renderfarm renders the scene everything comes out perfect except for the bright people which look out of place and draw unwanted attention away from the subject matter of the animation...the architecture..

 

Long shot here, but any ideas on how to fix this problem??

[dannyprice]

I don't use it that often but:

 

On the populate ribbon there is a tab 'display' there's a tick box 'save textures'. This will save them to your local drive so either move them to a network location or package the render assets up at render time.

 

Now it also sounds like max is recreating the material as well as the map hence the diffuse and diffuse amount reverts to default. Could you setup a photoshop action to desaturate and save the maps?

[Francisco Penaloza]

You could assign an object ID to them and save your frames as EXR, then in photoshop or after effect use that channel pass to adjust their color.

this option is not optimal tho because the dependency of the AA.

The only way around for us is render larger than final cut.

For use sometimes 3K will do, depending how far are the people from the camera.

[James Vella]

As Francisco said, we use object IDs, EXRs and matte them in post for colour correction. (Im using populate right now for a large animation project)

 

Ensure you swap them to the high quality models after you are finishing placing them

 

Finally if you want their colours to be less bright (match the scene), then ensure you convert their materials to your render engine - otherwise they will have standard materials and will blow out. This should be an auto process if using corona/vray.

 

One final tip if you want the scene to move faster after - i recommend point caching each model out. However without a script this could prove painful.

[dannyprice]

The only issue with adjusting the saturation in post is that you will still get vibrant people in reflections.