Not talking about Leeloos Multi-Pass from Fifth Element here
I’m rendering animations with multiple passes through output nodes in the compositor. Each time I setup a new render I manually set the location of each output node. That can’t be how you pros are doing it. Solution? Link to solution?
You can set the save location to match the location of your blend with two slashes, i.e.:
//myImage_###.tga
This will save a file “myImage_003.tga” to the same folder where your blend file is saved. You can also create and/or assign folders:
//RENDER/DIFFUSE/diffuse_###.tga
This will save your render in a folder named “DIFFUSE” which will be placed in a folder named “RENDER.” If these folders don’t exist then Blender will make them for you. (Or it does for me on my mac, at any rate.)
MultiLayer files would simplify the situation vastly, and for at least three compelling reasons:
All of the information of all the layers will be in one file.
The information will be stored in a numerically high-resolution, linear color space. You can do whatever you need to do with no loss of information at any point. (OpenEXR/MultiLayer is a file format that is expressly designed … by ILM, no less … for representing “digital intermediate” information in arbitrarily-long production cycles.)
You can introduce all of the layers, distinctly, back into the “downstream” processing with just one file-input node. Blender automatically knows it’s MultiLayer, and what layers exist.
In short… this is the way that you should be doing this.
That’s awesome! I’ve never tried MultiLayer before. I often composite in After Effects, and just ran a quick test. You can use the EXtractoR plugin and every box I checked in Blender’s Render Layers showed up as a rendered element. For instance, you assign “RenderLayer.AO.R” to the red channel, “RenderLayer.AO.B” to the blue, “RenderLayer.AO.G” to green, and you have a 32-bit AO pass! And all the passes are there in one sequence!
How did I ever manage to live this long without knowing about this? Thanks for the tip sundialsvc4! The number of files I need for a project was just reduced by a zillion or so…
What bugs me about the fileoutput node is that you have to manually set the the frame range. If you extend your animation you have to go back into the node editor and type in the last frame number for every node (at least in 2.49). I wish that node would just pick up on the frame range from the timeline.