<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"><head>
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8"/>
<style type="text/css">.mceResizeHandle {position: absolute;border: 1px solid black;background: #FFF;width: 5px;height: 5px;z-index: 10000}.mceResizeHandle:hover {background: #000}img[data-mce-selected] {outline: 1px solid black}img.mceClonedResizable, table.mceClonedResizable {position: absolute;outline: 1px dashed black;opacity: .5;z-index: 10000}
</style></head><body style=""><div>
<div>The project is finished, and I did a short making of just on the Blender part:</div>
<div> </div>
<div><a href="https://blenderartists.org/forum/showthread.php?413442-Blender-VFX-on-Swedish-TV-Show">https://blenderartists.org/forum/showthread.php?413442-Blender-VFX-on-Swedish-TV-Show</a></div>
<div> </div>
<div>cheers,</div>
<div>Thomas</div>
</div>
<div> </div>
<div> </div>
<blockquote type="cite" style="position: relative; margin-left: 0px; padding-left: 10px; border-left: solid 1px blue;">Sergey Sharybin <sergey.vfx@gmail.com> hat am 16. Juni 2016 um 09:57 geschrieben:<br><br>
<div dir="ltr">Hi,
<div> </div>
<div>Inlined answers.</div>
<div> </div>
<div class="gmail_extra">
<div class="gmail_quote">On Thu, Jun 16, 2016 at 9:09 AM, Thomas Volkmann <span><<a href="mailto:lists@thomasvolkmann.com" target="_blank">lists@thomasvolkmann.com</a>></span> wrote:<br>
<blockquote style="margin: 0 0 0 .8ex; border-left: 1px #ccc solid; padding-left: 1ex;"><span style="text-decoration: underline;"></span>
<div>
<div>Hi,</div>
<div> </div>
<div>I'm using Blender on a shot for a bigger project right now, and while I'm enjoying it a lot (never had a single crash so far and its not a lightweight scene) there is some stuff that I either don't know how to do, might do wrong or simply can't do because of the programs limitiations.</div>
</div>
</blockquote>
<div> </div>
<div>Wow, you sure you use Blender? ;) It crashes so often based on reports in our tracker :)</div>
<div> </div>
<div>It's also always interesting to know what Blender/Cycles is used for. Is your projection mentionable/showable?</div>
<div> </div>
<blockquote style="margin: 0 0 0 .8ex; border-left: 1px #ccc solid; padding-left: 1ex;">
<div>
<div>So if you could please shed some light on a couple of questions...</div>
<div>Here we go:</div>
</div>
</blockquote>
<div> </div>
<div>Here are some answers for you :)</div>
<div> </div>
<blockquote style="margin: 0 0 0 .8ex; border-left: 1px #ccc solid; padding-left: 1ex;">
<div>
<div> </div>
<div><strong>1.:  Custom AOVs (Passes)?</strong></div>
<div>I need to create a couple of RGB masks. At the moment I create a new renderlayer with an override rgb material (Obj-ID decides if R,G,B, or black). Since I have a couple of objects, I end up with a lot of renderlayers, which makes the rendering process longer. In Vray there is the multimatte-element channel that you can use for that and in Arnold you can freely setup your aovs (passes, channels, whatever it is called in different software). Is there something like this in cycles that I haven't noticed yet, or is the workflow I'm using atm the one to go for atm?</div>
</div>
</blockquote>
<div> </div>
<div>There is no such a thing in neither Blender in general nor in Cycles in particular. So for now your workflow seems as optimal as it could be in Blender.</div>
<div> </div>
<div>Not saying it's impossible to improve it by making passes more flexible :)</div>
<div> </div>
<blockquote style="margin: 0 0 0 .8ex; border-left: 1px #ccc solid; padding-left: 1ex;">
<div>
<div> <strong>2.: Custom Attributes </strong></div>
<div>As I understand it, cycles can already access some predefined attributes on a per vertex level (?). But how about if I give custom attributes to objects? E.g. if I give a customID property to my objects, could I use that in the rendertree instead of ObectInfo->ObjectID?</div>
</div>
</blockquote>
<div> </div>
<div>That might be interesting extension of shader trees, but it's not possible at this moment either. Currently Cycles know knothing about custom properties and can't have any clue what to do with them.</div>
<div> </div>
<blockquote style="margin: 0 0 0 .8ex; border-left: 1px #ccc solid; padding-left: 1ex;">
<div>
<div> <strong>3.: Nodes</strong></div>
<div>I really could use some nodes like the "rescale" node that is mentioned in another thread on this list, because I'm running a custom OCIO configuration and run into the fcurve issues <a href="https://github.com/sobotka/bassam-test" target="_blank">that are mentioned here</a> (last point in "Help! grading is tricky"). Also a random node with a seed input (e.g. ObjID) would be awesome. Which brings me to the next point....</div>
</div>
</blockquote>
<div> </div>
<div>Not sure you need rescale node, sounds more like making it so Cycles uses same working color space as rest of color pipeline. Lukas Stockner had a patch for that.</div>
<div> </div>
<div>Can see why rescale node can be handy in other occasions. But thing is, it can be achieved with 2 or 3 (depending on parameterization) math nodes, which is kinda quite too simple to make a dedicated mode for this. I would say: this is something what should be solved with node templates. We need those templates anyway, with ability to easily share/reuse them across projects.</div>
<div> </div>
<div>How random node is different from noise? Do you want different values to be returned for same shading point at different samples?</div>
<div> </div>
<blockquote style="margin: 0 0 0 .8ex; border-left: 1px #ccc solid; padding-left: 1ex;">
<div>
<div> <strong>4.: Beginners Guide to write cycles shaders/nodes</strong></div>
<div>Is there some guide on writing and compiling cycles shaders (not osl) and custom nodes (maybe I could write the nodes in 4. myself?). Could compiled shaders and nodes be shared, or has a custom blender build to be used for that?</div>
</div>
</blockquote>
<div> </div>
<div>There are some video tutorials form various folks around blender community, AFAIR there was also some DVD training material from BI.</div>
<div> </div>
<div>Not sure what you mean by compiled shaders. You can't share SVM bytecode, that would even be quite useless. But you can share node setups in .blend file. The idea here is to have a "library" .blend file from which you link or append a material tree or a node group. This is as much easy as it could be in default blender (there are addons for online material collections and such, which sounds more friendly but i didn't try them yet).</div>
<div> </div>
<div>But making it easier to share assets is definitely a direction we want to move, hopefully it'll happen sooner than later :)</div>
<div> </div>
<blockquote style="margin: 0 0 0 .8ex; border-left: 1px #ccc solid; padding-left: 1ex;">
<div>
<div> <strong>5.: Logging</strong></div>
<div>I think I already asked that a while ago, but is it possible to reduce cycles logging output? The log files on the renderfarm are huge, and I porbably just would need some summary info.</div>
</div>
</blockquote>
<div> </div>
<div>It's not possible to reduce logging and in fact, i'm tempting to think verbosity should be increased (for example, --debug-cycles used). Here are reasoning:</div>
<div> </div>
<div>- You don't really want any logging while everything works fine.</div>
<div>- This means, renderfarm software can just delete full log file after job/task successfully rendered</div>
<div>- Different render farms might want different summary, so it kind of more flexible if farm itself worries about summary info it want to manage (CPU temperature, phase of Moon, whatever).</div>
<div>- Some really commonly requested summary (such as render time, memory usage which was added recently AFAIR, camera , file, scene..) are saved to render result's metadata. Advantage of that is that it then readable by Blender, so you can drop rendered sequence to VSE, enable SHow Metadata, scrub timeline and see timing info. Neato :)</div>
<div>- But unfortunately, render farms might and does go crazy time to time: black frames, missing textures, wrong animation, etc.. In order to troubleshoot such issues current verbosity is not really enough (for Caminandes VR we were using --debug-cycles command line argument to increase verbosity even more ;). If you'll drop idea of having full render log it'll be much more impossible to troubleshoot such issues.</div>
<div> </div>
<div>So not really convinced Blender should worry about renderfarm logs, renderfarm software itself should worry about that. For example, as mentioned above, wipe logs once job/task is finished successfully.</div>
<div> </div>
</div>
-- <br>
<div>
<div><span style="color: #666666;">With best regards, Sergey Sharybin</span></div>
</div>
</div>
</div>
</blockquote>
<div><br> </div></body></html>