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Rendering the impossible


manta
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Hello,

Well I've decided to try and conquer an old problem, and I'm kinda stuck,

trying to render a huge file, so I'm experimenting with something simple first.

I've never used layers, they're pretty cool, I understand the concept of layers, having used photoshop for a long time... so here is my question :

lets say you are doing an animation with many elements that simply won't render(too much memory) crash you're done !!!!

So you start to render layers, you start with the background and work your way forward with the layers, which brings up another question, what happens when your background layers become your foreground layers, because the camera has now traveled to that side....I hadn't thought about that, anyway my real question is the shadows, I know you can do a shadow pass, but when I do one, it renders the scene first, and then gives me the shadow pass, well if the scene won't render, how am I going to get the shadow pass, obviously the shadows are everywhere interacting with everything, so I don't know what to do, is there a way to just render the shadow pass (something I haven't checked or something)

 

Thanx

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I assume you are talking about Max/Viz. Your best bet is to group pieces, or put them on layers, and turn off/on as you see them. This will keep the memory consumption lower. You could also try Xrefs.

 

If you can't do that, you may want to try to turn off shadows or use raytrace (less memory intensive, more CPU), or a combination of the two.

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ooops, sorry, yes I am using Max...

This problem I am trying to overcome, is from a past project, I would like to solve it before accepting a new project with the same problems, if I can't reach a solution, then I won't be able to accept jobs of this size.

 

In that project I was using raytrace shadows, and using Vray using Vray shadows, in both cases it just wouldn't render, I was also using XREF's, didn't seem to make any difference memory wise...

 

In the Max help files it says you can render out specific passes without rendering the whole scene, but it doesn't really go into much depth, I guess I'll keep trying...

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I've done what you’re talking about but I used Adobe Premiere to composite the layers together. Basically you start with you background, then what's in the middle, and finally what is in the foreground. Render each of the passes as still tiffs with alpha channels, so that when you bring them into Premiere you can use the transparency option to separate the alpha from the rest of the image. Once this is done it's just a matter of putting the layers in the correct order. You will also need to render out shadows and reflections separately and this can be done by using the "Render Elements" option or you can simply make everything invisible to the camera but still cast shadows and reflections. It's been a while since I've done it but I think that's basically it.

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Hello,

I'm going to use combustion, and I was kinda hoping to use RPF files, I still haven't figured out how to render just the shadows with the shadow pass, it still renders the whole image first, and then the shadow pass...which won't do me much good when I try this on a previously unrenderable file...

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Well just incase anyone cares, here's an update, I tryed rendering just a shadow pass, and it still couldn't handle it, I think it may still need to do a full calculation in order to give you a shadow pass...

 

Well it was Brazil to the rescue, I didn't have Brazil when I originally worked on this project, and just assumed I would get the same results (crash), but much to my surprize it rendered it, maybe it has something to do with having 3 accelorators for rendering heavy scenes, it takes a while to render, but the memory never goes above 1.4 gigs, so maybe it is worth the extra money, I didn't try Vray advanced,(just vray free) so I can't say that vray couldn't do the same, maybe even faster, but I'm happy just the same...

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