Opinion: Render Partitions similarities with Blender Layers

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Draise
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Opinion: Render Partitions similarities with Blender Layers

Post by Draise » 03 Feb 2015, 22:39

Watch Summery

I don't know about you, but I gathered that the power of SI's render partitions are for AOV, overrides and keeping render passes clean for potential compositing later. I love it, very powerful.

I just watched Blenders summery on a similar system - their render layers system. It is simplified, and with limited number of layers and aspects - but it looked... like it was a user friendly version of what Partitions are used for, with overrides, AOV's, masking and the like. I like the looks of it.

What do you think? Do they compare? How does it compare to others out of the box?

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Mathaeus
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Re: Opinion: Render Partitions similarities with Blender Layers

Post by Mathaeus » 04 Feb 2015, 00:42

Well I remember this very well, when I've started in times of XSI 4, exactly XSI render pass system was a first feature, where I felt rewarded, somehow. Sounds funny today, but in these times, XSI modeling was overcomplicated for me, rigging and animation was only a huge mass of info, hard to connect into anything meaningful. Reference for 'everything needed when it comes to subds' was a Japanese modeler called Metasequioa - looks like toy today...

But, I've first used XSI render passes for something unusual, it was possible to setup a sort of automatism for baking the AO into textures for game models, using different texture projections through materials applied to partitions. Later, used passes regularly for sequences of pics, but almost never that 'common' approach, split to diffuse, reflections and whatever. Much more used an 'object pass', different passes for characters, background, object in front of characters, shadows from characters. I'd say, 'object pass' is always a time saver, you can just blur the background, so on. While 'color pass'... more or less refection here and there... - with just a bit less of ambition, easy to live without this thing.

Back to Blender, actually it was possible to create a sort of XSI 'object pass' in old Blender internal renderer, to some extent, but, I think this worked properly only in complete scanline mode. Remember some weird things with ray traced reflections. But who uses only scanline mode these days. When it comes to Cycles and other PBR things, reeealy is not easy to split up the all these bounces into something easy to manage, later.

In other word, it all depends of what you doing, demands, habits, what is expected to be changed later. Personally, more controls, more tools to manage these controls = better.
Blender layers and passes - great for free app, much moree than in some commercial apps, but not enough for me to feel enough 'protected'.

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