animatable render region?

Support Lighting and Rendering
1

Hey guys - not sure if this is the right section. I was thinking today about how much faster cycles renders when I have a render region around just that particular object that I want in the scene. It would be cool to be able to animate that render region, so that if you wanted to render a cg character that had interactive lighting from outside their environment, you would just render the pixels inside the box. And as the character moved, so too would the region.

Make sense? what do you guys think?

2

Also learn about Render Layers and their Mask/Exclude functions. I haven’t tried the render border addon but one might be able to place a plane with a holdout shader in front of the camera. Cut a hole in the plane, parent to an emtpy and animate that? Oh and turn of every ray except camera for that plane.

3

Those are great ideas and scripts, thanks! @Hoverkraft - that’s cool! Never thought about doing that. I’ll try it.