ED + Rendering and backgrounds

Support Compositing and Post Processing
1

I have been testing out blender for about 2 weeks now trying to make a discission on a recommendation for a 3d app for work. I recently watched Elephant Dreams and downloaded the .blend files. I have a few questions.

What rendering software did they use?
Where are all the backgrounds and effects? When I pressf12 it looks nothing like the finished work. None of the backgrounds seem to be in the animation files. Were they composited in later?

2
  1. Blender has its own internal renderer. Images were rendered in HD resolution.
  2. Blender uses renderlayers; layers of the scene are rendered at a time, and then composited together. The background (actually a set, not just a flat background) is on a different renderlayer. If you go to 07_04_Emo_flips_out, for example, Emo and Proog are on renderlayer 1, and the tileroom is on the RenderLayer 2 (TileRoom). You can see these renderlayers several ways, by selecting the layers in 3D view, or look at the Compositing Nodes and you will see how we use Nodes to do image processing, merging the set (the room) with the actors. The renderlayers in use within a blend file can be found in the Buttons window, Scene Render buttons, Renderlayer tab in the left-hand panel.
  3. To see the final composited scene, you have to enable Do Composite in the Anim panel in the Buttons window, Scene Render buttons.
  4. You can, but you don’t have to. What they did for that specific project, I will defer to someone who actually worked on the project.
3

All the compositing was done in Blender’s internal compositor, and most of the shots had characters and backgrounds on separate render layers, and in some cases, scenes.

The reason you may not be seeing the background models, is that they’re in separate files, referenced into the animation files via linked groups. You need to recreate the folder structure with the /lib folder (which contains the models for the backgrounds) side by side with the animation folders (01_prologue, 02_scissor_attack, etc), inside the production folder. Then then animation files will be able to find the backgrounds properly and link them into themselves.

This blog post may help shed some light on this: http://orange.blender.org/blog/behind-the-scenes-shots

cheers