From the course: 3ds Max: Rendering for Compositing in V-Ray Next

Making a pipeline decision

From the course: 3ds Max: Rendering for Compositing in V-Ray Next

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Making a pipeline decision

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- [Instructor] One of the decisions that will typically need to be made very early on in the life of a compositing-based project, and one that we would certainly want to make before getting into any kind of serious work inside V-Ray Next and 3ds Max, would be the choice of workflow or approach that we're going to take with our scenes. Simply because this will determine what will be needed in the way of Render Elements in order to complete our project to the desired standard and inside the stipulated timeframe. For instance, if we only have time on a project to apply some basic color corrections to objects, maybe add some overall color grading, and then finish things off with a quick 2D depth of field effect, then we are obviously only going to need a very small number of render elements with which to work. It really doesn't make sense to set up, store, and then possibly even recombine lots of render elements on a shot if we know for a fact that we're never going to have time to make good use of them. On the other hand, of course, if we are creating renders that we know for a fact could potentially require big changes once we get them into the compositing phase, so maybe renders that are being added to a live action plate, for instance, then we can straight away surmise that we are probably going to need control over lots, if not all, of the major components contributing to the scene. Which in turn means that we will probably need to generate a much greater number and variety of individual render elements as well. Having to re-render a densely populated 3D scene in order to make some small and yet critical change or correction to an image, or even to acquire a critical render element that we didn't initially add to the mix because we didn't think it would be needed, can be costly. Not just in terms of machine hours, but also in terms of the potential that it creates for us to miss an all-important deadline. Another aspect of this organizational phase of the project is the need to determine how our 3D scene is going to be broken down. So we could, in the case of a simple scene, just render out the desired elements for the scene as a whole, and then composite them back together again and tweak things up pretty easily. What, though, if we have a much more complex scene that has a whole lot more going on? Well, in that instance, we may decide that there is a need to break things down even further and perhaps cut the scene into discrete chunks for rendering with the classic foreground, midground, and background method perhaps being one of the most well-known and easiest to work with, though, perhaps not always the best option. We may also need to decide whether or not those discrete chunks themselves will need to have render elements created for each of them, given the extra complexity that this will naturally create in the final composite. Now, of course, for many of us, sitting down to think through and organize the rendering phase of a project in this way could seem like a dull and painful process. But if we just remind ourselves that when done properly, this approach can become not only a creative exercise that gets us to look at our scenes much more closely than would perhaps otherwise be the case, but can also be a process that ultimately produces a much higher standard of work in the deliverables that we produce, then we will hopefully see why it needs to become an essential part of our day-to-day creative process.

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