I am testing blender to replace our main 3d app after seeing how much progress is being made with 2.5. I do live action compositing in Nuke and want to convince some of the 3d guys I work with to use blender too.
Currently we use maya at the studio but I am trying to see if i can get everything i need directly from blender and then convince some other people to switch.
I have seen that there are limited render passes that you can get in blender internal render engine. For example there is no P pass which is very useful in Nuke for relighting.
I see tutorials for yafaray, luxrender and others but I havent seen any directed towards compositing, creating custom passes etc which is very common in the industry.
I need exr support, raw gi, ao, uv passes, normals, p, etc. What we use daily and what we expect to get as compositors.
So which renderer should I use? Please dont tell blender is not yet ready. I want to use it.
Out of the available rending engines for Blender, I would suggest you use Yafaray for animations and Luxrender for still images.
I know Yafaray can save out EXR files. Currently, Yafaray cannot render out seperate passes automatically. You have to set it up for each pass and render it manually. I am sure you could write a python script to automate the process though.
Blender Internal would have the most options between them as far as render passes goes. You can get great results with any of the above mentioned renderers, but as far as render passes go, it pains me to tell you that Blender isn’t ready for you yet.
some of the important things are using proper lamp falloffs, linear workflow (google if you don’t know) (blender 2.50 can do it automatically), hdr skies (for good reflections) etc.
a good alpha calculation (incl. “only shadow” material for compositing)
flickerfree / noiseless animations
effort to setup the scene/materials for rendering
multiprocessing
Multipass rendering
And all solutions here will fail in one or the other feature. Maybe VRay will fit them all (don’t know, never used it).
Blender Intern (lacks in Motion Blur. MBlur is slow and broken with FSA in 2.49. VecBlur has problems with objects which appear/disappear or specials like halos) (And other smaller problems)
RIB Renderer: Aqsis has some more features than Pixie (and more active development), but no multiprocessing. Hard to setup the rendering.
Lux/Yafaray: You have to know what you are doing. Tends to flicker and full of noise. I think both have no MBlur and no “OnlyShadow-Material”.
To sum it up. There is no perfekt (free) renderer for Blender, to render all professional possible sequences for compositing.
pixie. looks like a one man project. Cant trust it for production work.
aqsis. Looks better but not well integrated in blender. Too much work to set it up.
vray for maya/blender. Limited support for now. Limited number of render passes. This could be a solution in the future.
blender internal. project london. As far as i know they used blender for compositing. Blender talks nicely to blender but not to industry standard tools like Nuke. Blender cant be used for real compositing work because it is too slow compared to Nuke and cant be integrated in a pipeline. So blender can only be used as a compositing app for hobbyist projects.
Blender has to work better with Nuke and then we could use it in production. Mainly we only need 3 things:
Fix fbx export of cameras. Now we have to export them as .chan. In maya I can export the entire scene as fbx and import it in nuke. Geo, cams, animation, everything!
Fix exrs. Combined pass doesnt go to rgba and all the other passes come out flipped. This is insane!
More passes support, like P pass.
I know many others professionals will not take the time to come and research all this things.
They will say: Maya works so why switch!
I like blender but the road is still bumpy for those trying to use it in production.
Anyway, I’ve seen a few comments around from industry players that the Mosaic script for Renderman integration with Blender is what makes Blender usable in a professional setting. Mosaic works with all Renderman-compliant renderers, including the open-source Aqsis and Pixie.
Pixie and Aqsis are both single processor and lack certain features. Lux is noisy and slow, only good for stills. Yafaray has bugs (on windows) that prevent mesh based lighting from working reliably (I get crashes). Which is too bad, because that is the one reason to use Yafaray is mesh based lighting.
I would still say Blender Internal is your best bet. With Blender 2.5’s AAO feature, you can certainly approximate mesh based lighting, although it is a fake but it looks good and can render nearly noiseless.
If you are into RenderMan, Mosaic and 3Delight (not free-but affordable) would be my second choice.
Zum- maybe I don’t understand the question, but Blender definitely can be used to produce those passes. Just not export to EXR and expect it to work. I’ve used Nuke, and what I usually do is just export out the passes to a “File Output” node in Blender then hit render. Gives me all my passes to seperate directories. They work great in after effects. The normals I’ve never tested with Nuke, but they work great for re-lighting in Blender- use them all the time to change my lighting. AO pass is beautiful if using approximate setting. Reflection pass is awesome- the only issue I usually have is with the shadow pass- but I’ll explain that another time.
If I only use Blender, I’ll usually save it to “multi-layer” output with “RLE” Compression- all the passes in one file! Then I’ll open an empty project, import the sequence in the node compositor and start- 2.5 animateable nodes is perfect for matching nuke.
There are some rendering issues sometimes with Over ranged numbers- but if you know compositing- then you’ll know how to clamp those.
Not sure what the “P” pass is, but the normal pass properly linked re-lights well- its all in the math…
Is that what you were asking?
Oh yeah- fo rcamera export- I think there is a script for After Effects that exports in the Maya format though (which is weird but works), I’m sure thats the case- I think I tried it with Maya- but not recently- so let me check- been down that path as a TD a while ago…:eyebrowlift:
rib mosaic looks like an excellent project. Didnt know about it, thanks guys. I installed it and tried aqsis. Got it to to work. Will have to dive into it. 3delight support is great too.
Yeah Blender does that with just the normal pass and using the plugin Normal node- which allows you to totally re-light the subject- so yeah it can- it works well- just has to be connected properly which is why maybe most don’t know about it…
