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Tutorial: Making Giants Part 7 | The Details

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Paying attention to the details.

So we are getting reeeaaally close to rendering out some frames. But before we do that, we need to make sure that we are really happy with a few tiny details.  Small things, really. You know, stuff like the animation, textures, lighting, camera settings, etc.  

Render responsibly people. The frames you save could be your own.In this episode we go over the state of the cut, come up with a hit-list of tweaks to make, and then knock those out while setting up a bunch of different render passes.

We go into render settings and ways to knock your render times down while keeping quality high.

If you're working on your own Cinema 4D project, we HIGHLY recommend checking out Rebus Farm.

They have saved my bacon more than a few times and are very reasonably priced.

Every episode of Making Giants comes with the most up-to-date projects and assets so you can follow along or break apart anything that isn't covered in the videos. Just login to your free student account to download.

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Tutorial Full Transcript Below 👇:

Joey Korenman (00:11):

Time to hit render, go to the beach, come back, start sending autographs, right? Yeah. So this thing is feeling pretty good, but there are plenty of spots that could use some work. What we need to do first is get all of the animation, the textures, the lighting, and the layout, just the way we want. So let's walk through the cut and talk about what's working and what's not. So first off, why don't we watch this piece one more time and see where we're at? Giants are not what we think they are the same qualities that appear to give them strength are often the sources of great weakness. The powerful are not as powerful as they seem; nor, the weak as weak.

Joey Korenman (01:20):

Great. So cohesively, I think it's holding together pretty well. I think, you know, we've got the shots, it tells the story. We want to tell the pacing's working. Uh, and for the most part, the animation is good, but there are definitely some things that could be better. So let's just go shot by shot and talk about this. So shot one, the way we start, I'm digging this. Okay. Um, I like it up until this camera move. It feels a little abrupt still. I want to smooth it out just a bit. So that's one thing I'm going to do once we get to this final position, one thing that's always bugged me. And I think I figured out a good solution is, you know, the way the ground is constructed, we've got this low poly look. There are some straight edges here, like this edge, which is blocking the bottom of the plant, creates a very hard straight line edge to the plant and it looks unnatural.

Joey Korenman (02:11):

And I want to break that up. I want that plant to, to feel like it's, you know, kind of rooted in the ground. And right now it feels like someone took a razor blade and cut the bottom off of it. So what I'm going to do, you may have noticed this, but on this shot here, I added a bunch of little rocks. I thought it would be, I thought it might make this shot a little more interesting because we're so close to the ground that, you know, that it felt so flat. Like there wasn't enough detail. So I added a few of these little rocks, you know, just really easily using the cloner. And, uh, what I might do is hand place some of those so that they break up that bottom edge. So I could place it actually very close to the camera here, maybe a little rock kind of here.

Joey Korenman (02:51):

It'll be a little bit out of focus, but it's going to break up that bottom edge of that plant for us. Okay. And then I might add a few other ones, uh, just kind of sprinkled throughout the scene just to give us a little more variation in the ground. Okay. So that's what I'm doing on the first shot. Now on this shot, I want to do a little bit more work to draw our eye right here. And I think what I'm going to do, there's several things I'll do, including having some depth of field so that this building is slightly out of focus. When we composite, I'm going to vignette this shot, you know, so that this side is brighter. So we kind of look there, but another thing I could do is play with the density of this frame. Right. And, you know, density is basically just the amount of information, um, you know, in a, in a spot on screen, right?

Joey Korenman (03:38):

And because we have the same texture across this uniformly lit ground plane, the density is pretty much the same all throughout this region. So our eye, you know, kind of gets lost around here and, you know, you're, you're, there's, uh, there's several cues to make your eye go here. The building's pointed that way. The shadows pointed that way. You have the flower, but it would be great if we could do a little bit more and maybe adding some of those little rocks or maybe even some bigger ones that are maybe boulders or something and pleasing them around this part of the frame, but not so much over here, it's going to draw our eye over there. Um, we could also do some things in compositing to make it look like, you know, maybe there's clouds or something, or there's, there's less light over here than there is over here.

Joey Korenman (04:21):

But I think just adding a little more detail, maybe even using our brush tool and pulling up a few little mounds around here, just so that you have a flat area of the ground here, and then there could be mounds over here. Again, just another way of having more visual density over here, then you have over here drawing your eye there. All right. So that's another thing we're going to do. Um, now this shot's actually working pretty well for me. I might play with the speed that this face kind of opens up. I might have it open up a little bit faster, and once we render it out in composite, what I'm going to do is add some little particles that kind of come out of it, almost like little seeds or pollen or something like that. Just so it's more like you, you know, you'll be able to sense that that flower is kind of all of the sudden taking control or it's about to do something.

Joey Korenman (05:11):

It's giving you a hint that something is about to happen. Okay. Um, I may I'll have to see how it looks, but I really like how these little rocks look in this shot. I might add some, you know, back here, actually, frankly, now that I say that I probably won't because this shot is going to have shallower depth, the field where the background is going to be a little bit out of focus anyway. So you're not going to see those all right. This shot. The one thing that always bothered me about it was when the vines come out of the ground, there's no like sign that they're coming through dirt or anything like that. They just stick right through. So what I might do is model a little mound of dirt at the base of these and animated on as the vines animate on. And I think that that will help it will help it, it will help it feel like the vines are actually penetrating and pushing their way through.

Joey Korenman (06:01):

It'll give them a little bit more impact. Um, and then there's going to be some nice depth of field on this shot and all that good stuff. But other than that, the shot's working pretty well for me. Uh, whatever I do to this, to, uh, to this shot here, I need to also do to this shot, right? If I add boulders or I tweak the shape of the ground, another thing I want to do though, is I want a little more variety in the speed of these vines. They're all traveling at pretty much the same speed right now. So I'm going to offset the key frames a little bit, have some go slower, some go faster. I also want more leads to show up. Um, I, you know, the leaves I've decided are going to actually have like a texture like this, a little bit of a purple kind of fringe to them.

Joey Korenman (06:39):

And I think that's going to look really nice against the green vines. And I just want to see more of them. It's just more interesting. I think I also want more leaves on this shot too. So I'm going to have to tweak my particle emitter settings to get more leaves to come out. Um, and, and then, you know, do the little amount of dirt thing. All right. Then on this shot, this shot is actually working fairly well for me already. Uh, but what might be cool to take a look at is to see what happens if I have more of these leaves animate on, because I really like the way they look when they kind of flap open. And I kind of want it to be a little bit busier at the bottom of the frame. So it might be helpful to have some more leaves, maybe even some more vines.

Joey Korenman (07:21):

I don't want to go too crazy, but maybe a few more vines, a few more leaves just to make it feel a little bit more like a swarm of vines, but the way everything's moving, uh, you know, the, the pacing, the way they move around like that in love and all that, this shot, I'm pretty happy with the way this vine set up is looking, but I'm not happy with these vines at all. The ones that are on the floor. I literally copied this whole setup to this shot. The problem is from really far away, this works fine, but when you're close to it, there's not enough detail. You can see these really straight segments of the vines. I need to add some more detail to the splines. There need to add some points, move them around and get a little bit more curvature and probably make them thinner.

Joey Korenman (08:04):

Um, so I got to play with these. They're not working for me very well yet, so I'm going to have to make that work and you can see I've already put a couple of rocks, these tiny little rocks in this shot. And I may add a few more. I may just add a few more just to sprinkle around and make it feel nice. Um, and then this shot, this shot I'm digging. Although I might want some more leaves on these vines, but the amount of vines I actually am pretty happy with, um, because it lets it, it makes it feel like there's just, you know, by the time we get to the top, right, there's a swarm at the bottom. By the time we get to the top, not all the vines have made it to the top, but we only see three that make it, but that's all you need for Mr.

Joey Korenman (08:45):

Flower to, to conquer. All right. So I might add more leaves to that. And then one big thing I want to do is tweak the pose of this a little bit. So I posed the flower when I modeled it, and I posed it based on this shot where this is the shot, where this flower needs to feel small compared to the building. It's cowering a little bit, almost like it's bowing its head, but at the end here, it's now the winter, right. It is victorious. And so I want it to look a little prouder. So I'm literally just going to have that sheath rotate up a little bit, almost like it's just looking up now instead of looking down. Uh, and I think that that's, that's probably all I'm going to need to do. It's going to be a simple tweak. Uh, we rigged it, um, in a way where it's going to be easy to animate it like that. And that's basically the tweaks we need to do. You know, there's a lot of compositing that needs to happen. There's some type animation, there's still a lot of work to be done, but overall we're in good shape. We just have to get those final touches on the animation and the layout and everything so that we can send this thing off to the render farm.

Joey Korenman (09:48):

Now that we have a hit list of tweaks to make, uh, I just went through each shot and did whatever needed to be done, tweaking settings, moving things around, adjusting the shape of a vine here and there. And then I went back and I really dialed in the textures and the lighting, the plaid felt like it needed a little bit of love to get it to pop more. You know, it's the hero it's supposed to stand out. And I really liked the saturation that I was seeing in the vine. So I wanted to play that up some more in the actual flower. And so I did a bunch of low res test renders to tweak the lighting and make sure that everything that's supposed to pop does, and that shadows land where they're supposed to. And I'll definitely do more kind of fake lighting and the composite, but it's a good idea to get as close as you can in 3d, after knocking out the tweaks, I did a new set of hardware renders, and I put the cut back together once again for a last minute check, because soon we're going to be sending this thing out to render.

Joey Korenman (10:44):

So I wanted to make sure that I liked what I saw Giants are not what we think they are The same qualities that peer to give them strength Are often the sources of great weakness. The powerful are not as powerful as they see More, the weak as weak

Music (11:27):

[inaudible]

Joey Korenman (11:34):

It's feeling good. The last thing to do is prep everything to render. So for the first bunch of shots I'm going to be using Rebus farm, they're really great, really affordable. And there's a plugin inside of cinema 4d to check all of your render settings and textures for you. And then it submits the render, right from cinema 40, your frames get rendered. They get downloaded in the background back to your computer and, you know, using a cloud-based farm like this is in my humble opinion, the future of render farms. I highly recommend Reba's for the ex particle shots though. I'm probably just going to render local because as it turns out, I'm headed to NAB for a few days. So I can render those on my machine and that'll let me sleep a little easier because I know there won't be any weird glitches caused by enormous 1.5 gigabyte particle caches uploading to Reba's farm.

Joey Korenman (12:27):

Before I submit though, I need to make sure every single particle animation is cashed. I need to make sure my render settings are dialed in correctly. And I usually like to render a bunch of passes so I can totally tweak the look to death and composite. So I'm going to take my most complex shot, like shot seven, which has every single thing in the film in one frame, and I'll get my compositing tags and multipass settings all dialed in. So we're going to work with shot seven because I think it's pretty representative of, you know, the kind of challenges we're gonna face. So some shots are going to have depth of field. Some shots are going to have motion blur and what I'd like to do, uh, when possible is render both of those in the 3d render, using the physical renderer. Okay. So first thing we need to do is turn on depth of field in the physical render.

Joey Korenman (13:18):

All right. So you just add the checkbox and now depth of field is on and now depth of field actually reacts to the focus distance of the camera. So what I do sometimes, and I, and I was messing around with this at some point during the making of this, what I like to do is I make a NOLA object. I just call it focus. And then I drag that Knoll object into the focus object, a little, little property down here, um, on the camera. And I did that on all three cameras, since this is a camera morph tag setup, um, just to be safe. I plugged that focus Nolan to all of them. And then that Knoll is basically right there on the face of the building. So that's what we're focused on. Now. The other property you need to worry about is in the physical tab of your cameras, the f-stop all right.

Joey Korenman (14:06):

So the default f-stop, I believe is F eight. All right. That's what cameras come in at. Now. We're going to have any and be inclusion. We're going to have global illumination and our final render settings. However, when you're just testing depth of field, you want to leave those off. I'm going to hit, uh, option R to turn on our interactive render region. And I'm just going to make a little window like this and let it render out and let's see. All right. So you can see that something is not behaving properly here. Right? You're getting like everything's way out of focus. Uh, nothing looks right. So let's troubleshoot this. Okay. So you've got a camera one, and I know what I did. I turned the fo the f-stop way down by accident. That's how important that f-stop is. All right. Let's try that again.

Joey Korenman (14:58):

And what we're looking for is building and focus plants slightly out of focus. Now, it's hard to tell, uh, with, you know, the interactive render region, sometimes it's a very low quality render. Um, you can actually grab this little arrow and crank it all the way to the top, and then it's pretty much a full render. Um, and once it's done, it'll give us a pretty good idea of how blurry this is, and this is way too out of focus for me. So that's why I increased the f-stop. I think I had it at 14, but let's just go ahead and set it to 16, and then this window should automatically rerender and update for us.

Joey Korenman (15:39):

And that is much better for me. And we'll let that finish out. So that amount of depth of field works pretty well. I actually dig that. Okay. Um, and just, you know, in case you're thinking, this looks really dark, let me expand this window out and you'll see that, um, you know, in the process of making sure the lights are in the right spot, the textures were all set up. Right. I made sure that this part of the frame has some light in it, and you can see the shadow of the building on the ground just to reinforce the idea that the whole, this whole kind of story, um, is predicated on the building, casting a shadow on this plant. All right. Um, cool. All right. So now we've got the depth of field dialed in the way we like I'm going to turn off my interactive render region.

Joey Korenman (16:21):

So then, um, you know, once we've got that set up, that's good to go. We can also turn on physical motion blur, but I'm not going to do that on shots that don't really have a lot of motion blur. Um, you know, every shot probably will have some motion blur on it, but I can use a post effect for slow moving shots like this and get away with, you know, probably half or a quarter of the render time. Uh, and, and then I can tweak it in the composite on faster moving shots, like the one where we're flying up the side of the building and the vines are crawling up. We're going to have to render the motion blur in camera. Um, and it's going to make the render times longer, but you're going to get a much, much, much better result. So in this shot, we don't need motion blur.

Joey Korenman (17:07):

So now let's turn on ambient occlusion and global illumination. Uh, and our output settings are half of the final resolution that we're going to be rendering at. And the global illumination settings, um, are just the default. I'm not going to, I'm not going to mess with those. Those are, those are fine. If you want, you can go to one of these presets. Um, exterior, physical sky would probably work fairly well for this, but I usually just leave it on the default. What I do change are the physical settings, and this is why I use the physical render, or one of the challenges that you have when you use aim inclusion and global illumination is noise when you're rendering animations, especially, and the physical renderer works little differently in that you can tell it basically an error threshold, and this is sort of like the amount of noise that it will allow to creep into the render.

Joey Korenman (17:58):

20% is a pretty good amount of noise, right? So if I hit render, all right, and this'll take a minute to render. So while it's rendering, let me kind of explain what's going on. So it's basically saying, okay, you can have 20% of the image noisy, all right. And it's, there's way more technical details to it than that. Um, but in essence, that's what it's saying. And you know, you, you may not even notice it on a still, um, but on a moving animation, you are going to see noise. And even on the still you are going to notice the noise. If you look carefully, let me zoom into this, um, zoom into this render as it's happening, right. And you can really see it on blurry stuff, right? Where, you know, the render has to basically take a bunch of samples in order to get that depth of field effect and where you really can notice it is an ambient occlusion.

Joey Korenman (18:49):

That is like a terrible noisy culprit. So what I need to do for the final render is figure out what settings I'm going to need to make this, um, you know, to actually make this nice and make it, make it look nice. Um, and I just went into my top of you by accident. Now, the, um, pop over here, here we go. All right. So you might be tempted to just say, well, let's just set the quality to high, and it's going to set the shading error threshold to one. It's going to up some of the sampling subdivisions to, right. And I'm not going to get too technical with what's going on, but let me just hit, render and show you how much longer that is going to take. Okay. So that frame only took 41 seconds to render, and this is half Rez. So in full Rez, it's going to take about four times that that long, which is not bad.

Joey Korenman (19:40):

Okay. Now this one, the GI is still calculating. All right, because, uh, you know, we need more samples for that as well. Um, and the physical render is, is sort of taking its time and it's calculating, um, ambient occlusion, a little bit more robustly and all of those things. So while this frame took 41 seconds and then was done this one's at 35 seconds, 36 7, and we haven't even gotten one render bucket filled. Okay. And you can see that this is going to take, you know, not like twice as long, but it's going to take like 10 times as long. Okay. There's no way that, you know, we can afford to let renders take this long. So what I like to do is, is start with low. Okay. And I set the shading error threshold to something like 10%. Okay. That's still a pretty good amount.

Joey Korenman (20:34):

Now, if you set it to medium, it sets it to 5% low is 20%. So I'm kind of splitting the difference. I'm saying 10%. Okay. And then another thing I like to do, knowing that ambient occlusion is where I'm going to get a ton of noise. I'm going to turn on multipass rendering and I'm going to enable the ambient occlusion here it is the ambient occlusion pass. So now when I hit render, all right, it's going to start rendering. And once it starts, I'm going to be able to go into this layer tab and actually just look at the ambient occlusion pass, which is going to be really helpful because I'll be able to just see if that channel is noisy, which a lot of times it is. So you can see this as rendering much, much faster than the high setting, slower than the low setting.

Joey Korenman (21:21):

Right. But, but still, you know, probably not a terrible, terrible render time. All right. We're at 30 seconds, we're already getting some renders. Um, the mountains and the ground and stuff, won't take a long time to render. It's really the building and the vines where all that detail is that are going to take long time. Okay. Um, and on earlier shots, by the way, where we don't have these vines, those are gonna render faster too. So let me go into my layer and look at the I'm going to click on single pass and go to ambient occlusion. Okay. If I pop in here, you can clearly see noise in the AME and occlusion channel. Okay. So if I want the ambient occlusion to be cleaner, to get rid of, you know, some of that noise, there are some post-processing things I could do. I could try to degrade it a little bit in post, but I mean, that's quite a bit of noise.

Joey Korenman (22:08):

That's, that's probably going to be noticeable. Um, other than that, though, if I switched this to 100% resolution, so we can get a good look at it, you can see other than that, I don't really see too bad of a noise problem. Right. We're going to probably add some grain over the whole thing anyway, when we're done. So any little grain we see will just kind of get blended in and we can do some degrading stuff if we need to, but the ambient occlusion is going to be noisy and going to be a problem. Okay. Um, this is also a good time to point out. One of the reasons I like to render multipass is because look how dark it gets down here with all that ambient occlusion. Well, if I have it as a separate pass, I can brighten that part of the render, but keep all the rest of it as it is.

Joey Korenman (22:48):

And it'll, um, it gives you more control. So how are we going to make that ambient occlusion, less noisy? Well, if you go into the physical settings, you can actually write this, this shading error threshold is sort of like a master control. All right. It sort of controls the overall amount of detail that the renderer goes into, but you can also manually tweak individual things. So if your depth of field is feeling a little noisy, which it kind of was, so I might up this to three and then ambient occlusion subdivision, you could add more there. Okay. And subdivisions without getting too technical, just think of it as, um, you know, a level of detail settings, something like that. So if I go from two to save for now, we're going to get twice as many samples on the AB and inclusion. All right. So let's do another render.

Joey Korenman (23:38):

All right. And each time we do this, it's good to kind of notice what this stuff does to the render time. Nat frame took a minute and a half the first, the first time we rendered this frame and we, I guess we rendered a different frame, but it was 41 seconds about twice as long on this frame. Okay. And the frames weren't that different, there was a little bit more geometry maybe, but really, you know, just tweaking the physical render settings about double the render time. So now on this one, we're at 30 seconds. All right. We just upped the ambient occlusion samples and the blurriness samples. So it's going to take longer, but at night it might not take that much longer. And let's go into this ambient occlusion pass and take a look at that. Look how much smoother that is, right. Compared to this ambient occlusion pass.

Joey Korenman (24:24):

Look at the noise here, and then look here much smoother. That's probably an acceptable result. Okay. So now that's a pretty good render setting for me. Okay. And I just want to double check. I'm going to let it finish so I can make sure that the depth of field looks good. Again, this is a half Rez render, um, you know, ideally do it, do a full Rez render and check a four Rez render because you know, you're going to notice way more detail, um, that would make this, uh, this tutorial section of the video really boring. If I did that though. Um, but do that, you need to do that. So, but look at the difference in the noise in that ambient inclusion channel, it is so much cleaner. And even if we just look at the image, like let's zoom in here and take a look at the depth of field on this image versus this image way less noise.

Joey Korenman (25:15):

Okay. And our render time, it was amazingly, somehow lower. I'm not, I don't know really how that happened. There's actually, that was a faster render. You know what probably happened? I know why I know why it was faster. It was because, uh, since all we did was change some of the settings, I think cinema 4d, you reuse the global illumination calculation that it had already done, which probably saved us about 30 seconds. So let's just say that this would have taken a minute 45. It really wasn't that much longer. You multiply that times four to get a rough estimate of what a full-size HD frame's going to take. And, you know, you're talking about five minutes of frame, totally acceptable. Um, even if we don't use a render farm, which for the X particles shots, I don't think we're going to use. Okay. So now that I've got that set up, let's talk about the passes we're going to want to use.

Joey Korenman (26:08):

Okay. So in the multipass settings, I am going to add a bunch of channels. I'm going to add an RGBA image, which is just going to give me like a full render to look at, um, so that I can kind of compare when I put all the passes back together, I can compare and make sure that it actually looks that way. Then I'm going to add diffuse, specular shadow, and basically just go down the list all at ambient to reflection. There's no refraction, there's no like glass or anything in the scene. So I don't need that. I do have global illumination, uh, don't have atmosphere. There's no post effects, material color. Maybe I'll use material luminance, maybe, maybe not, but I'll just throw it in there. Um, and then I'm going to want, oh, that's probably it right now. Emotion, vector pass can be used to get more accurate motion blur.

Joey Korenman (27:04):

Um, but they tend to not work that well, sometimes just using a plug-in like real smart motion, blur just works even better than using this. Um, it doesn't really add much to the render time to, to have it. So I might as well add it. Um, and then I'm not going to render a depth pass cause I'm rendering depth of field in camera. Um, and by the way, one reason I'm doing that is because this scene is humungous. The scale of it is ridiculous, right? We are very far away from this building. It's just huge compared to this plant, the problem with a depth pass, even in 32 bit is we're not really going to have enough detail in that depth pass because these two things are so far apart. So, and we don't need one. Um, so other than that, those are the image passes.

Joey Korenman (27:51):

I'm going to render out. I may not use them all, but you know, I can throw them in. You don't take much of a render hit to add it, but if you have to go back and render it again, then you have a problem. Okay. Um, and you'll see when we get into the compositing episode, what all of these things do and why I'm doing it this way. Um, excellent. All right. The other thing we're going to need are some object buffers for these objects, because I like to have a ton of control and compositing. And if I want to just affect the building or the vines or the mountains, I want all that control. All right. So what I've decided is I am going to have object buffers for the building, the plants, the vines, right? The mountains, the ground and the sky. All right.

Joey Korenman (28:36):

And I'll probably also have one extra, which is the mountains and the ground combined because technically they're the same object. I may want a little more control to push those mountains further back into the distance using, you know, like a distance fog kind of color correction. Um, and that's really all I'm going to need. Okay. So let's get started with the plant. So I'm just going to go to the plant. I'm going to add a composite thing tag onto this null object, buffer one. Alright. And I have a little note pad next to me. So I'm writing this down and the plant is one, so then let's do the building. All right. So you've got your final building. Now I've got two copies here, by the way. Um, which I don't think I ever went into in this, in these episodes. And the reason for that is because when I originally had all these vines in the building, casting a shadow, the shadow was so diffused by the vines that it didn't look like that nice, hard shadow anymore.

Joey Korenman (29:37):

And long story short, I had too many lights in the scene. And after the last step that a, that I just went through fixing the textures and the lighting and stuff, everything's working the way it should now. So I'm actually going to delete this building and this compositing tag. All right. So now on the building, I can put a new compositing tag with an object buffer channel two. All right. I'll write that down. So now building has channeled to, and you can literally just copy and paste these to the vine. So I've got ground vines and vines, and, and these are, these are my ex particle binds, and these are my ground vines. Both of these, I want to have buffer three. All right. So the vines are going to be three. Okay. And then the mountains are going to be four. So let me just copy one of these onto the mountains for, and then the ground is going to be five and the rocks.

Joey Korenman (30:36):

These are part of the grounds. I'm just going to copy that. Uh, and then there's the sky and the sky can be six. Cool. And actually let's do this. Let's make the sky seven because I also want an extra object buffer, which has the mountains, the ground, and these rocks all combined in it. Now, why do I need that? Well, you can take a mat for the mountains and the ground and the rocks and just add them all together. And in theory, you should get the same result as if you had all three of them on the same object, buffer in reality, sometimes with anti-aliasing and stuff, you get a little thin edge. All right. So it's, it's easy enough to just say, well, let's, let's take the mountains, right. Which are for the ground is five. The rocks are five. Let's grab all of these and also make them six.

Joey Korenman (31:27):

So now the mountains are on four and they're also on six. The ground is on five and it's also on six. The rocks were on five and also six. Okay. So I'll show you, let me do like a little test or under here. Let me make sure I got Amy inclusion on I'll turn my depth of field back on. Um, and, uh, actually, yeah, we'll, we'll leave those on so you can see what that looks like. Okay. And I've got all of my numbers written down here, so I know exactly what everything is supposed to be.

Joey Korenman (31:54):

And we are just going to do a test render and check our layers. Okay. Um, and I got to make sure this is also very important when you're setting stuff up to render, do as many tests renders as you need, because once you send it off, I had, did not have multipass turned on. I had turned it off. Okay. So this looks good. That field, all right. And what I'm going to do, because you know, it's going to be kind of tough to remember all of this. Um, here's another thing I forgot to do. This is great. You can see how you can see how poor I am at managing renders. So what I forgot to do is add those object buffers as multipass, you know, settings. Right. You have to tell you it, cinema is not smart enough to know, oh, you have object buffers.

Joey Korenman (32:40):

You probably want me to render those. No, you have to tell it. Okay. So I'm going to say multipass object buffer, right. And I'm going to need seven of those. So I'm just going to do that real quick. 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7. There we go. And of course there are plugins or scripts that will do that for you automatically, but I don't use them because I don't know. I'm, I'm so lazy. I won't even try to find a tool to like, make my life easier. It's like a new level of lazy. Cool. All right. Now let's check this out. Make sure we're good. And you can see now in our, uh, if we go to image, we'll see the image rendering. If we go to single pass, we'll be able to select any of these passes and see what they look like, which is going to be pretty handy because we'll be able to tell if our noise settings are good.

Joey Korenman (33:32):

I mean, typically you're going to get noise on ambient occlusion, maybe on the shadows. If you're doing a lot of like area shadows or something, which we're not. Um, and, uh, and potentially on global illumination, although I found when you use the physical render and you get that noise threshold setting, right. Um, you'll end up, let me go to image so we can see what this is doing when you get that. Um, you know, that this setting here, the, um, this one, the shading error threshold, when you get that dialed in, that generally takes care of your GI noise. Okay. So let's just kind of poke through. So here's our ambient occlusion pass. Here's the global illumination pass, which is basically just the effect of light bouncing around your scene. Right? So you can see, like the sky is blue, it's bouncing some blue into our red mountains.

Joey Korenman (34:23):

Right. Um, then you've got the ambient channel, which is basically, you know, it's sort of like the, the color of, of, um, of an object with no light on it. Right. Then you get your shadow pass, right. And you can see our shadows from the sun and really the sun, our sun light is the only thing, actually casting, shadows. Uh, we've got our specular pass, right. Which is going to be really nice and composite. We can crank that up and get a little bit more of the shininess on the building. Your diffuse pass is basically your no bells and whistles, 3d render. Here's our motion vector, which we may not need, but maybe we will. Um, it has a ton of noise in it. Uh, our material luminance, our material color. This is interesting too. We could use this to actually flatten out the final render if we wanted to, if we wanted to kind of, you know, get rid of some of the shadows and just bring back the color.

Joey Korenman (35:18):

We could add this back on top. We've got our, our background, right? So this is our sort of, um, our full render that we can reference. Then we've got our plants, object buffer. We've got our building object, buffer, our vines object buffer. We've got the mountains, we've got the ground, the mountains and the ground. And it looks like we missed a couple of rocks here. Okay. So it's a good thing. We did this little test and then the sky object buffer, um, which it's interesting. So if you look right, if you look, uh, let's look at the background and then switch to this, you're seeing that sky kind of bleed through there. Right. It's really interesting. Um, and I'm not sure why that's happening. It could be because there's such a thin little stem there. Um, but that's okay because what, I would really use this for, I would use it maybe to color correct the sky, but I probably use it more to be able to add a little bit of, um, of an edge light to some of these mountains and maybe parts of the plant and any problem areas like that.

Joey Korenman (36:30):

I'll just mask out. Okay. So with all of these passes and we, you know, we do need to go in and fix this one. Um, we need to fix our ground, but other than that, everything is working. We've got all the passes we want, here's our reflection pass by the way. And you can see that cause we have reflectants turned on in the mountains. That's where we're catching some of that blue. Um, and you're not really seeing much reflection up here on the building. Um, but on the shot where we're closer to it, I'm sure you will. So there we go. So we've got all our passes set up. Um, I'm going to, uh, figure out why the, oh, here we go. Ha. That's why, because I've got, I've got two sets of rocks, ground rocks and rocks. I'm going to drop that in there and now we are good to go.

Joey Korenman (37:15):

So now we've got these render settings. Okay. And let's, let's, let's, let's do this. I'm going to take this render setting here. I'm going to, I'm just going to clone it. It's right. I'm gonna hold command and I'm going to call this final render. All right. And I'm going to switch to final render and I'm going to just double check and make sure all my settings are exactly what I wanted. Right. We upped the shading error threshold. We up the blurry, we up the ambient inclusion, everything else. We were happy with depth of field on this shot. Good to go. And we've got all our malt or multipass settings here now, where do I want to save these? All right. So technically I don't need to save a regular image. I can just save the multipass image. All right. Um, so I'm just going to turn that off and I'm gonna leave multipass on and I'm gonna set the format to open EXR.

Joey Korenman (38:05):

That's typically what I render in when I'm doing multipass stuff, you get a ton of information. That's great for color correcting. And it's a multi-layer file. If you check this box, which means you can just render one set of files and split the channels out. Um, and since we're going to be compositing this a nuke, it's exactly what I want to do. So I'm going to pick a directory for this. So let's just go down to the giant C4, the outputs, and we're going to say final renders. And then, because I'm superstitious, I'm going to say R one and we're going to put it in there. Okay. So this is going to go in a folder called shot seven, because this is shot seven, interestingly enough. And we'll save it as shot seven. Cool. All right. So this is now a render setting, right? I could actually go to render, um, and I could say save preset, final render.

Joey Korenman (38:59):

And what's cool about doing that. All of these settings are now ready to go, so that, let me save this, this shot. Right. So now if I hop into another shot, like let's hop into shall one. Okay. So here's shot one and I can go into my render settings, render setting load preset, final render. Boom. It's done. It's ready to go. Now, one thing I forgot to do, which so I should delete final render and come back to shot seven. I forgot to actually set the correct render size, which is 1920 by eight 20. All right. And just to make sure I did that, right. I'm going to lock the ratio 90, 20 by eight 20. Perfect. Okay. And now I can go save preset final render. Great. Okay. So now this is ready to go. Um, what I'm going to have to do is manually set the frame range on every single, um, shot, because I only want to render the frames that are actually used in the cut.

Joey Korenman (39:56):

I don't want to render a single extra frame if I don't need to. I can always go back and render extra frames if I need to, but I don't want to, because I'm going to be paying for a render farm. And these renders are going to take a long time. So only the frames I need, but these settings are good and I may have to tweak them shot to shot. I may have to turn on motion blur for some shots. Um, and you know, I may not want that to field for certain shots. I may actually want to just fake it to myself. Um, so I'm going to tweak little things like that, but the multipass settings are all good to go. As long as I set my object buffers up exactly the same way each time. And then we will be good to go.

Joey Korenman (40:31):

All right. So now I'm going to go through every shot and fix this up for render. So a quick note, there are definitely smarter ways to do all of this kind of pre-render stuff, which would have saved me the trouble of having to go back into every shot to set up object, buffers and whatnot. But when you're playing fast and loose, like I've been doing, sometimes you just kind of skip over those details until the end. And since there's only eight shots in this whole piece, it's not a huge deal. Anyway, I set up all my shots. I manually set the frame ranges and the output settings. So I'm only rendering the frames I need. And then I clicked render fingers crossed

Music (41:16):

[outro music]

‍

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