Nope
“Nope” by Jordan Peel was a project I helped completed during my time as a Lead Technical Director at Moving Picture Company.
My role in the production involved working with;
- Layout and Rendering for implementing instancing of FX Assets into the workflow from the perspective of Layout
- Compositing and Rendering to provide bucket-based rendering optimizations
Reducing Render Time for Hidden Objects
For optimizing render times, I implemented a workflow which uses an inverted alpha channel, designed by Rotoscoping artists, to drive RenderMan into rendering only the pixels that are a value higher than zero. In RenderMan, this is known as the “Matte File” on the PxrCamera.
This was accomplished relatively quickly by creating a Katana Macro that read the scene description to determine which shot to pull the Matte file from, and resolve the latest version using a Lua OpScript that scans on-disk. With this information, I used the same OpScript to set the PxrCamera Matte File attribute.
Whilst this doesn’t speed up scene graph expansion, it can shave off those few minutes spent on regions of the shot that are known to be hidden. Considering there were approximately 15 versions for 100 shots, those minutes turned into hours of render resources saved from not being used.