⚡ Hyper Shot — Blender has no native concept of shot states, so I built one

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I’m missing to switch all other important datablocks per scene or viewlayer.
In my Addon “Takes for Blender” (soon releasing) this is possible.
No manual work anymore.

Depends on how you handle it.
A “Linked” Scene with an assigned camera in scene settings is a Shot, if you add individual lights, animations, etc.

Yes, but so can be a Viewlayer inside the scene.
Just need more effort.

Fully agree! :slightly_smiling_face:
Blender is not efficient in this part.
Lots of redundancies and duplicates.
No way to be fast in defining the states and refining on the go.

This is a huge gap, that I’m also talking about.
No way to handle it at the moment officially.
My addon can do it easily. :stuck_out_tongue:

I agree. A solution has to be flexible enough to adapt on many cases.

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I forgot to mention, that most addons are using custom properties to store data.
This is not native.
As soon you want to switch to another stage management system, you have to start from zero, because the data is not compatible.

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I’m still interessted in understanding on this matter.
Why creating another renderset or easystates?

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Hi NIWO!

I used RenderSet a bit, but I felt that several things were missing for my own workflow, so I designed Hyper Shot with a different focus. RenderSet is more about render presets. My strategy is different: Hyper Shot is built around shots, scene states, and rendering is only the final part of that workflow.

The main differences from similar tools:

:one: First, the UI. I really care about a clean, minimal, carefully designed interface. The RenderSet panel didn’t really fit the way I like to work. Also, RenderSet includes some render/context settings that I personally don’t use. In Hyper Shot, I went in a different direction: the user only adds the specific shot settings they actually need. This keeps the panel clean.

:two: Second, Groups. Love it. Groups let you connect multiple shots together and share the same visibility preset between them. For example, if you have 10 close-ups of Character A, you can hide one object once, and it will be hidden in all 10 shots. You don’t need to go through every shot manually and repeat the same visibility change. Groups can also share a camera and world, if needed.

:three: Third, the render queue and progress feedback. Hyper Shot has a progress bar with a fairly accurate ETA, so during a batch render I can clearly see what is rendering, what is finished, and when the current job will be done (animated shots).

:four: Fourth, the scanner. Before rendering, Hyper Shot scans the output folders and shows the render state of every shot. So you can immediately see whether a shot is already rendered, partially rendered, or not rendered yet.

:five: Fifth, timeline management. Hyper Shot can automatically mark the timeline with shot markers and create gaps between animation shots. For me this is essential. If there are no gaps and I later need to extend a shot, I have to move the animation keys of all following shots manually. With gaps, I can adjust shot length much more safely.

:six: Sixth, bulk actions. In Hyper Shot, this works more like Copy Attributes / Paste Attributes in video editing software. You can copy only the specific data you need from one shot — for example, the output path — and paste it to other shots.

:point_up: It is also important to say that, as far as I know, RenderSet was created by a serious studio. It is a good and powerful add-on. So in some areas it may be more powerful than Hyper Shot. I am a solo developer. I spent months developing and testing my add-on, and I really hope I reached a good level of reliability and stability.

:vhs: Here is the full Hyper Shot tutorial. It may help you compare it more accurately with similar tools: https://youtu.be/F0p3EKyGr4w

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Sure. I marked the timecode.

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Well, in general it’s not especially useful. But again it depends on the workflow.
What I’ve seen for lighting in houdini, is that they could treat multiple shots at the same time. So they can have a master lighting and do some tweaks on a per shot basis all within the same file, which is pretty cool !

But in blender working like that feels clunky. In the meantime, you might want some tools to do some batch operation on different shots even if they are not part of the same files. For lighting having a way to test a master lighting on multiple shots is going to be super helpful but it doesn’t necessarily means having all the shots in the same file : You can import all cameras , the set and a pose from each assets. And make an animation with each shot taking a frame. (which would be done by a script) …
It’s not 100% accurate but generally enough to build a master lighting that holds up in most shots. And in any cases it’s always tweaked on a per shot basis.

But there is also the old school way : Lead light make a master light rig on the most generic shot, once the shot is approved lighters copy that to each corresponding shots of the sequence, do small tweak and then they check continuity by rendering and checking.

Anyway, scene assembly and lighting is just another step, then it’s handed to other artists to export for compositing and eventually final grading.

Also, as discussed earlier, sometime layout can be done at sequence level, so the step between storyboard and animation, that is setting camera , adding assets in the scene testing that everything works as intended before animation, that can be done in the same file. And then it’s split into one file per shot.
Some studios work this way and I think it’s cool, but some others dont :slight_smile:

As a side note, while having one file per shot is the norm in animation, still there are very different ways to approach a project depending on it’s complexity or if it’s low or high budget. So even within the same industry something that makes sense for a project doesn’t for another, so nothing is really set in stone !

Generally one shot per file allows to split the work whenever you want. If artist A is having an issue they can hand over the shot to their supervisor and move on to another shot. Once the supervisor finished tweaking stuff artist A can resume it’s work on the shot. Here again multiple shot within the same file makes things like that harder.

Last thing I want to point out, is that when working on an animated project, there are always custom tools / addons that helps to customize the workflow.
Working with vanilla blender is going to be extremely difficult. Also there is a CG supervisor that create a particular workflow given the specifics of the project. So, as said earlier, some stuff can vary…

Ok, sorry if my answer is messy I’m not sure it’s addressing your question properly, this probably need a bit more in-depth explanation of the workflow with more practical examples. Anyway, it’s super interesting and having cross industry discussion like that also allows to sometime think out of the box and find new ways of working. I also think that for some small projects animation can be approached like you suggest, with one shot per scene, put together in the VSE. But this is very limiting for collaborative work.

I’m happy to continue the discussion if you have further questions, and maybe we’ll manage to make things a bit more clear eventually !

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Thanks for your comments, sozap. Absolutely agree. If you are a solo freelancer, you have one workflow. If you are part of a large studio team, the workflow is completely different. Both approaches can be good - they just need to be used where they actually work efficiently.

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I did some digging into how Blender Studio handles animation shots, and it adds an interesting angle to this discussion.

From what I understand, Blender Studio doesn’t try to solve shot management with native Blender tools alone. Their workflow sits on top of Blender: Kitsu, Blender Kitsu addon, shot files, asset casting, etc.

In that workflow, a shot is defined in Kitsu first. It has a name, duration, assigned assets, tasks, status, and probably other pipeline metadata. Then the Blender Kitsu addon can use that data to build a dedicated shot file.

The pipeline also knows which assets belong to which shot, and the shot-building process can link the required assets into that shot file. Makes sense for a studio, where different people work on assets, layout, animation, lighting, review, etc.

There is also edit synchronization. Shot timing can come from the edit / VSE side, and the frame range of the shot file can be updated when the edit changes. So frame range is treated as part of shot management, not just as a random render setting.

So I think the point is:

Once you start working with shots as separate units, Blender’s native tools need a shot-management layer on top.

For a studio, that layer can be a full pipeline like Blender Studio uses.

:point_up: But does a solo artist or a small team actually need that kind of workflow? Probably not. Setting up a full-blown studio pipeline is usually just overkill - you’d end up spending more time managing the database than actually rendering frames.

In that case, a smaller shot-management layer inside one .blend file can make more sense. That’s basically the space I’m trying to explore with Hyper Shot.

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Hey everyone,

I just published a new video tutorial about Hyper Shot’s Batch Render and Disk Scanner.

It shows how shots are added to the render queue, how the addon checks existing files on disk, and how it gives you a clear overview before starting the batch.

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Yeah the way Blender Studio works is very similar to classic animation pipeline.
There are different software like kitsu that act as a database for the project and also store all the tasks , comments for the whole team.

This is indeed overkill for solo artist.

Yes, TBH there is a big stretch between a studio collaborative workflow, and something like what you did even for solo or small team project.
I think for animation ( meaning character animation, pixar stuff) the way Hyper Shot is structured feels a bit limiting. But that might be interesting for product viz, or mo-graph stuff.

If you’re looking into various inspirations , you can check this one :

VSE seems a good candidate with having scenes as shots for solo or small team project. Especially with recent additions in VSE where you can switch scenes as scrubbing the timeline. Using scenes isn’t perfect if say you want to share some render settings but it leaves a bit more breathing space to account for all the different stuff that could happen in different shots.

What you did is cool too and different projects different needs, and each experiment is interesting. Anyway, if you’re looking for something that would be useful to many VSE is worth investigating !

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Interesting. VSE + Scenes looks like one more way to approach shot management for animation shots. I usually edit in DaVinci Resolve, so I never really went deep into Blender’s VSE. Definitely need to investigate it.

Hyper Shot will keep evolving, so different workflow perspectives are very useful for me.

Thanks, sozap!

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Yes ! Resolve is amazing obviously, in the meantime, editing 3D scenes live just like it’s a footage but without intermediate renders is pretty interesting, especially for previz stuff. VSE has multiple camera / camera override support too !

Another cool thing with VSE is that you have access to all the power of blender python API which is generally lacking in all the NLE out there.

Finally VSE has improved a lot these last years, it comes from a long way and there is probably some little things to iron out but yeah definitely worth checking out !

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