- In the past few weeks I've been finishing
the rendering and compositing for Tasteful.
If you follow me on Instagram,
you probably saw some frames and shots
that I post here and there,
but today I wanted to talk about
how I rendered the film.
What render engine did I use?
How did I structure my render layers and shaders?
Also, how I ended up using a render farm
for a large portion of the renderings.
Let's jump into the technicals.
As you probably know I made the entire film in Maya
and after considering different rendering engines,
including Maya's own Mental Ray,
Andre, our lighting and rendering guy for Tasteful,
convinced me to try Redshift.
Which is a GPU based render engine.
What I found appealing about that is I basically
only needed to have a really good graphics card
and it will do all the work.
Which could be cheaper compared to a high-end processor.
It also meant that I had a good reason to make
my computer awesome for gaming,
but that was just a bonus.
So I bought a GTX-1080 which is not top-of-the-line
by any means, but still a great card.
My renderings were not bad.
Taking anything between 10 to 30 minutes per frame.
We basically used five different shaders
for all the objects in the film.
One was our default material which we used for
most of the objects.
One that was like the default one,
but with a little bit of reflection.
One that is much more reflective
for a more plasticky look.
One for metals and one for skin.
Now even though many of the characters
don't really have skin,
but rather fur, feathers, or scales,
we used that material for all those purposes
since we're not really going for realism here.
Then I had to take these five materials
and assign them to all the assets
using different colors.
Then our film was ready for lighting.
There were a few objects that
needed different shaders, like the objects
that had some kind of a texture on it.
Mainly the signs.
For that I just used the default material
with an image texture on it.
For the lighting, we used a very basic set up
consisting of a main directional light
that I rotated to fit each shot
depending on which way the character was facing.
Then I sometimes added another light
if the shot took place in a dark place
that was blocking the sun, like inside the food trucks.
Also, I would sometimes turn off the
cast shadow option on the trucks
so the lighting would come through
instead of having to deal with a very dark interior
or lighting it inside.
Then I would usually split the shot
into a background layer and a foreground layer
occasionally adding a third layer if there was a
case in which a character was very close to the camera.
Then I rendered an EXR file with
the usual suspects for passes, diffuse,
global illumination, reflection, refraction,
ambient occlusion, depth mask, motion vectors,
normals, position, and sub-surface scattering.
We then take the EXR file with all the passes in it
and bring it into Nuke for compositing.
As for the rendering itself, like I said,
I started out rendering by myself
with my GTX-1080 and it was fine,
but I realized it's gonna take way too long
and I'll be wasting a lot of time
waiting for the renderings to be done.
I then remembered I was approached by
Fox Render Farm about a year ago
asking me if I'd be interested
in checking out their service.
I had no need for it back then,
but now that I was sitting around
waiting for renders to be done,
I thought it might be a good time
to check back with them and test out a
render farm service for the first time.
These guys were super helpful
and while they did give me a nice amount
of rendering credits to test their service
they did not sponsor this video
or expect anything in return.
As you know we don't do any sponsorships here,
but since I really like their service
and actually ended up paying myself for
the remainder of the renderings,
I thought I'd tell you guys about the experience.
It was a bit intimidating at first.
The app seemed like it would be
very complicated with a ton of settings,
but that's just because it's meant to work
with pretty much any software.
I was using Maya and Redshift so I had to
set up a project with those settings
selecting the version of the programs I was using.
Then all I had to do was drag my Maya file
into the app, wait for it to analyze it,
and you start rendering.
Then the rendered images just showed up
in a folder in my computer.
It was quite magical.
If you're still intimidated, which I definitely was
at first, you can hop on Skype to use their
live chat help desk, which I did,
and they talked me through
all the steps 'till my rendering started.
I should say it's not cheap.
One complicated shot cost me about
one hundred dollars to render.
That's definitely something to take into consideration,
but in terms of time saving, I was able to
finish a render in about an hour that would have
taken me over two days to do on my own.
I chose to use it for the really heavy and long shots.
I'm now happy to say that the renderings
are done and I'm pretty close to finishing up
compositing so I think it's safe to say
that the release date is very close.
I hope to make the official announcement soon.
(instrumental music)