Shot Workflow

Well, I've been racking up alot of shots with test animation, just to make sure it looks right, and in the process I found myself in the deep and mosquito ridden jungles of disorganisation. As such I've been getting some housework in order - after things came to be in a bit of a tangle, i began untangling with my unoffical favorite part of doing projects: automation.

The first thing is having a file referencing plan in the shot folder. When I had about 10 shots I realised that I was running around between files chasing settings like light attributes and render passes - it had the potential to get very confusing very quickly. So I made things a little more strict by having the animation, effect and environment elements all funnel into the lighting file. I made a rule that this lighting file is the only place where light linking happens, and where the beauty is developed. This lighting file is then referenced into the render file, which by another rule is the only place where render layers/passes and other render options live. After I did this, life became a little simpler, and I realised I could reuse environment, lighting and render files between shots - so all I really had to do was work on the animation.

After I did this I was able to work on new shots more freely, but that led to another problem - reorganising shots. Each shot is stored in a numbered folder, and inserting shots means renumbering others, which is a pain the next time you go to open your comping file. Since I knew I'd want to be constantly reorganising things, I automated my comping workflow as well, so it is the least intrusive to my work.

Of course, to minimise the amount of re-wiring in comping files the solution is in the use of relative paths, and having a different Blender comp file for each shot. The awesome part is I can reuse my comp files if my maya render layers follow a naming convention. Blender stays quiet if a image sequence input doesn't actually find any files, so the same comp file can be used for a variety of comping situations. When I've finished animating a new shot and rendered it, I just throw in a Blender comp file, open it, adjust the duration and hit render. All of the layering is done for me as per my render layer names, and the image sequence nodes can be set to 999 frames long - they just become blank when they run out of frames (most of my shots are only sub 200 frames).

All this means less time stuffing around, and more time animating :D