Part 2 (Fusion Compositing)
By Kelly "Kat" Myers.

Check out what OpenEXR can do when you know what you are doing!

Among other things on the show I would also run the render-farm, maintain all the systems, break out shots, conduct research and development sniffing out possible land mines and telling them to avoid them only to have them ignore me and step on them anyway and point the finger back at me as if it was my fault some how, and from time to time when I wasn't dealing with a bitchy compositor who shall remain nameless and the constant office politiking between the LA and Vancouver groups, I would do some art.

And that is what this is about. Making the best shots possible with the tools you and I both love - under the worst of circumstances - Fusion5 from Eyeon Software and Lightwave 3D from Newtek!

When you need to get stuff done fast and make it look absolutely top notch, those are the tools you need. Remember, the best features some of the "other standards of the industry" software out there that you have to choose from - are their marketing campaigns. Lightwave and Fusion are no B.S. tools. If you want B.S. and need to feel part of the so-called "in-crowd" while they market errr, offer training programs at 20,000 a year at some "arts school for film and tv" go get Maya or Max, work in Combustion, piss off and be in debt somewhere in the corner. While the processes described here in this tutorial are pretty much able to be carried over to any 3D/2D package combination, I can't stand most of the people who work in Maya or Max and I am certainly sick and tired of Combustion people who are always the first in line to say it can be done but hide under their desks when it comes to crunch time.

Battlestar Galactica uses Lightwave 3D and Fusion. GET OVER IT! No maya, no max, no XSI. A little combustion is used by the "mullet man" down in LA but well, that's just him and he's falling down as we speak. The output speaks for itself until he gets his hands on it and makes it look goofy from shot to shot with the occasional "snuck by him shot" that looks amazing, all done in Fusion and Lightwave.

On the 3D side, absolutely everything we do on BSG was straight out of the box Lightwave for the most part. No separate rendering engines, no custom code. If you felt that some shots in Season Three of BSG were trash, I agree with you. But don't blame the tools. Blame the VFX Supervisor of the show. He's ultimately responsible for the look. Keep in mind this is the same guy who did the mini-series and seasons I and II which rocked. Makes you wonder what went wrong? Anyway...

In this tutorial here today to show you how we would normally break out a space shot and then composite it to achieve kick ass results in the most efficient manner possible. Something that didn't happen much during Season III to my absolute disgust and to many of the fans of the show out there who saw a lot of questionable shots from time to time that really looked inconsistent. I am not pointing any paws here, but the point is when you break from established methods and run off in some weird direction without doing the proper R&D or ignoring the R&D you asked for by the guy you hired to do that, just because it might make you look like an idiot, well you will probably end up looking like an idiot anyway so don't do it. Trust is a two-way street. Anyway, point is if you stick with a plan that is well thought out and run tests that result in the look you are going for. Go with it! Optimize as you proceed, but don't break something if it works. And don't fix it if its not broken. Still, continuing to produce stuff half-assed doesn't help even if you have a "work around". The ultimate work-around is to solve the dammed problem.

Makes sense right? Well not much on BSG makes sense any more. Like killing off Kat and Starbuck and that side trip to New Caprica mixed in with endless and usless dramatically, flashbacks.. BOOORING. And lame. So much for the "Best show on Television".

Anyway, before someone accuses me of being a disgrunted ex-employee of General Electric Pictures Productions Inc. (the production company that produces BSG for Sci-Fi which is owned by universal and NBC which is owned by General Electric... wow, what an inbreed corporate structure...) let's proceed.

This is my first real full on Lightwave tutorial of any kind so be gentle.  :)

While I am going to use Lightwave3D9.0 and Digital Fusion 5.1 you could use just about any compositing program out there, but please consider this... If you are not using OpenEXR format for output of your renders from Lightwave3D via the db&w exrTrader plug-in for Lightwave 3D and compositing those OpenExr images in a program that can read them, then you need to highly consider it. You can check out the OpenEXR exrTrader plug-in for Lightwave 3D at www.infinimap.com. It's stupid cheap, works and saves a shit load of time. Otherwise you might want to spontaneously combust.

I am not going to be using a super computer to do these shots either. Just an off the shelf eMachines AMD Athalon64(SingleCore) +3500 with 1GB of ram on XP Pro 32bit running a simple nVidia 7600 series graphics card. Although I highly recommend if you have the ability to do so and the ram, go 64bit XP and never look back.

Alright now, let's get started.

Making a Scene Master!

A scene master (or master scene), is just as it sounds. It's a master scene were all the elements are combined into a single Lightwave 3D scene and from that single scene we will break out the other scenes needed for the different render passes and then throw those into render. The purpose of having a scene master and making dammed sure its absolutely correct to start with is important for a single reason. Conformity. The importance of this will be come stupidly clear as I progress through this tutorial.

To begin I am starting out with a very simple "space scene" featuring a Cylon Raider and a set of Colonial Vipers against a simple star backdrop. Included in this scene are the stars, the engines for the three types of craft, a main "Key Light" and if needed interactive lighting and volumetric particles. Yes those wonderful life forms known as hypervoxels! Kats love hypervoxels! They stick to the paws sometimes so you have to be careful. =^..^= I am going to keep this scene to the very basics so I am not going to do HVs here. But the important thing to remember is that if something in a scene needs to be controlled in the compositing process you have to make it possible to adjust that element independently and that means either rendering it out separately or defining it in a Render Buffer saver as an isolated element for control later in your compositing program.

Let's check out the basics of our Scene Master.
 

Ok we have in our shot the following elements.

OBJECTS
2 Colonial ViperMKII Fighters
1 Cylon Raider
1 set of stars. Basically single point polys in a scattered configuration. For more stars, load another copy of this or clone it and off set it slightly for its rotation. Easy stuff remember.

LIGHTS
1 Key Light. This is a distant light with a value of 80% and I have it pointing in such a way that it gives us a "scary and eerie" look to the shot scraping across the nose of our main Viper.
Engine Light Packages for The Vipers and the Cylon Raider. These are volumetric light rigs that we have on hand that simply bolt onto the fuselage of each of the ships its designed for and produces the look of the engines. The Vipers are an interesting set up because their engines in Lightwave are actually yellow/orange straight out of render but on the show they have been color corrected in the compositing process to be blue. The reasons for this being done in the compositing process are unknown, but I suspect that early on in the mini-series someone said "hey can you make those engines on the vipers blue instead of yellow?" and the easiest way for them to do this across a ton of shots already rendered out was to do a simple color correct. So to this day that's how its done and I will show you how to change the look of the Vipers engines with a simple color correction tool in Fusion later on.

In addition to these engine lights we will also have cockpit lights and helmet lights to deal with for each Viper. These will have to be broken out as well, but because they are for the same ship type I can break them out into a single pass on their own together instead of separately for each ship. Same goes for the Engines for the Vipers, but the Cylon Raider will have to have its own Engines broken out independently because of that color correcting issue with the Viper engines. Otherwise I could do all the engines in a single pass and probably get away with it. Each scene is going to be different depending on your compositing needs. To be safe break each scene down as much as possible. Keep in mind though that with each additional break out pass you will be adding render time not only to your Lightwave farm but also for your compositing both for rendering and for interaction in the software while you work on it.
 

Having broken out several hundred shots on the second half of Season II alone and encountering just about every single scene error possible in the process, I know what I am talking about. What made it maddening of course was that the people (the L.A. group) handing these busted scenes over to me were the very people who trained me (some of them being so-called "legends in the Lightwave community... frankly in my opinion they are more like Lightwave's albatross instead of legends) how to do this in the first place using this method and smacked me on the head when I made mistakes early on for the very same reasons, but took offense to it when I said "hey you left this on and that was set wrong and its different from pass to pass in the same shot, what gives?". Thank the gods Lightwave is the fastest rendering system on the planet because these guys scene break outs were huge time wasters not only in fixing them but if a mistake was missed, sucked up render-time. I am only Kat, and well I do miss things from time to time when each pass had something screwy with it on a consistent basis and i was forced into checking every single setting across the board to make sure they went it render correctly because "management" would never admit that the "legends" they hired actually sucked at basic Lightwave operations. You know, it's Hollywood. It was my ass if farm time was wasted so I developed this shot break out system to save it. But alas, I was reprimanded for doing just that. Even though I was also saving their collective asses as well in doing so. Like I said before... It's Hollywood.

Anyway, my camera settings are going to be as follows. These are considered the "series standard" for Battlestar Galactica with a couple of exceptions.
We render our CG out at 1280x720 with a pixel aspect of 1.0 (Square!). But wait? Isn't BSG an HDTV show? Absolutely it is but the reason for rendering at 720p instead of 1080p like you would expect us to is that to help us take the "computer generated" edge off the image we simply resize our renders up to full HD 1920x1080p in the very last step of the compositing flow in Fusion before adding film grain. This helps to keep render times down, gives us the look we want while also keeping the amount of data going through the composite manageable especially when we have several dozen layers of images to work with in each of the composites we typically do on the show. Thinking ahead is good for you!
 

Camera Panel Settings for our Scene Master! Note that our shot will have stars in it and those are effectively "paricles" as far as lightwave's rendering engine seems them. So that means having particle blur turned on. Also very important if you have HVs in your shot. Turn this on now and never stress about it again.

As I mentioned earlier my settings are a little bit different for the motion-blur section. I hate the look of dithered motion-blur frankly. I would rather turn up the Anti-Aliasing when using the classic camera to Enhance Extreme (33 passes of Anti-aliasing) with Normal Motion Blur than use Enhanced High Anti-Aliasing (17 passes) and dithered motion-blur which takes the same amount of time to render it seems. Honestly when you are at the classic camera's highest level of AA for Normal Motion-Blur with the advancements of Lightwave 9.0 and now even more so with 9.2, that so-called "studdering ghost" look most peope associate with the Classic Camera's motion blur and Lightwave in general, iis effectively gone while at dithered motion blur at 17 passes of AA still looks a bit goofy and has those damd comic book printing style dots across your image. BAD! Motion blur doesn't have "dots". Come on. Dithered motion-blur was original designed for use in fielded animation renders. It's of little use today when you have progressive frame formats as MASTERS and the kind of AA speed that Lightwave now has over above its already stupid fast processing from previous versions that make dithered, well look a bit dumb. But that's just me. I also don't like the results of how it looks in the compositing process. Do what you want to in your Render Globals panel and your Camera panels for your scene master, just ensure they are consistent and matched in your scene master file so that ever file you create from this master uses the same settings.

Moving on, once you have your Scene Master Settings finalized check them again. Here is a quick check list.

• Is your Camera and or Render Globals Resolution Multiplier set correctly (100%)?
• Are your motion blur settings correct?
• How about your Anti-aliasing!?
• Ray tracing? You always want ray-traced shadows on to start with. But RT Reflections? Refraction?
  For this example we won't need these in the Scene Master but in your Key Light and possibly your Fill (Spinning Light or Radiosity pass) you will want at least RT Shadows and probably RT Reflection too. But let's not stress about this here.
• Are your "running lights" rigs loaded? Engines? And anything else you need to have in the final results turned on?
• Is Ambient Light Intensity Set to 0% in your Global Illumination panel?
• Particle Blur? Is it on? Do you need it on? If so turn it on, if not, turn it off.
• Segment Memory settings? Make sure you use the right ones for your farm.
• Do you have anything turned on that's going to muck something up down the road like Radiosity if you don't need it except in a radiosity pass? It's easier to turn it off once here now, than it is to turn it off 45 times except that one time you need it on.
• Did you do a test render with everything on in the shot at a frame that has the most on screen to give you an accurate idea as to how your final shot is going to look?
• Are all your objects in the scene saved correctly so that if you loaded this scene back up again its not prompting you for missing images?
• Content Directory Right?
• Any plug-ins being used that don't play well on a network if you are rendering on a farm?
  
  All good? Ok now what? Save? Well yah but read this next bit when you do that.

I am going to touch on the delicate and somewhat controversial subject of file name conventions and directory structure.

If you work in a shop where artists and render farm people have to talk the same language (anywhere that is serious) it's and occasionally have to speak to people who have no business in working in VFX but signs your cheques, it's best that everyone knows what everyone else is saying and you stick to it. Especially if your 3D people also double as Compositors.

An established and agreed to directory structure system with proper file revision and naming conventions is like a language. So when your VFX producer says "hey I need you to take a look at the viper passes for BSG_303B_44x01" you know where to look for them regardless if he is asking for the 3D elements that make it up or the final output render or the rendered layers from the shot.

Here is a simple guide.
On BSG we have a central (point of failure with no active back up because they simply refuse to acknowledge they are not immune to disaster and like to live life dangerously against my recommendations) drive called "the X drive.

This drive is simply a big fat fast RAID5 box (5.6TB) mounted and shared on a fast server with all the systems on the network seeing it with read and write access and labeled as x:\ when they open up their windows explorer.

Under this main x:\ drive we have the following directories.

(Lightwave stuff)
objects
images
scenes

Then we have a directory called "Renders Episodic" and under this we have a directory for each season, then each episode, then each shot number for each episode. From there it breaks down into each element for each shot complete with revision numbers so you can find out where you are. And just for safety we have an "_old" folder. The underscore _ there helps to force the directory to be shown to you if you list the directory contents from alphabetically and well underscores come first before "A". Nice and neat.

This directory matches the same structure as our Scenes directory, which has an "episodic folder" under it, then repeats as above in the following example.

x:\scenes\episodic\BSG_SeasonIII\BSG_303B\BSG_303B_44x01\

So when you need to find out if you have to go back to fix something where it is for either a composite or the scene file that made the renders its easy to find your way.

Again scenes for that shot BSG_303B_44x01 can be found here: x:\scenes\episodic\BSG_SeasonIII\BSG_303B\BSG_303B_44x01\

While your renders from that scene can be found here:
x:\Renders_Episodic\BSG_SeasonIII\BSG_303B\BSG_303B_44x01\

And for the fun of it, your Fusion Composites would follow a similar structutre. Here is another example.
x:\FusionComps\BSG_SeasonIII\BSG_303B\BSG_303B_44x01\

Your Lightwave images and objects directories should also follow a similar structure so you can find stuff easily, same goes for your "plates" directory that you pull from transfer like TGA sequences for each shot and episode number. Break things up into categories that make sense, and stick with them. It will save you a lot of time in the end.

*Note that under each of these directories you will find either files and folders or both that contain revision numbers in their file name that make some kind of logical sense as to what it is!
 

Here is an example of our directory structure and naming conventions. See the revision number and how it has the full episode and shot number in the path?

Then we can start with the break out process. This is where it gets fun. Especially when you have to do 30 or 40 of these a day.

Here is my master scene in Layout. Notice how the volumetric engine lights are still loaded, as well as the key (off screen) and the raider eye? Load everything in to your master and then break it out pulling bits out you don't need for each pass.

 

On Battlestar Galactica almost always our space scenes have a single key light in them. It's how the key light pass is broken out for render that gives the compositors the flexibility to control the two primary elements of how this pass breaks down that's critical.

In the old days... before buffer export technology, which is actually years ago, but for some mid-way on season III of our show, people had to break out their key light passes by hand, meaning that the "Affect Specular and Diffuse" setting for the key light would be toggled on or off for each pass (Diffuse pass has just Affect Diffuse enabled on the light and vice versa for specular key light pass). Today however we know much better.

We have render buffer exports! Joy! Even better is renderbuffer export support through exrTrader!

To start I reload my Scene Master and immediately save it back out as my "Key Pass" before I touch anything. This way I can avoid the certain temptation to save over my Scene Master causing some serious damage if I change a bunch of stuff first. Making a "safety" copy of your Scene Master is a good idea. Do it. Yeah.

Now that you have started the break out process of saving out scene files, make a directory under your shot number folder called "Breakouts" and in that directory save your Key Light Pass file so that the path two it would be like so...
x:\scenes\episodic\episodenumber\shotnumber\breakouts\BSG_X0X_01x01_KeyPass_R01.lws Replace whatever you need to in that file name to make it sensible for you.

Now you can proceed to break out just the key light.

Start by eliminating all lights but the key light. When you built your scene you did label it "Key Light" right? Delete any other lights from the scene quickly through the Classic Scene Editor in Layout.
We also need to kill off the stars in my shot here. They can be made in a separate pass on their own later. So get rid of them to.

In addition I need to remove the engines, the cockpit and helmet lights for the viper pilots and the Raider "eye" which isn't just a light, its also a set of objects. Those also must go. When you have your stripped down "key light" scene this is the point depending on your compositing needs you make the determination if you want the Key light to be broken out for each ship as well, so you can adjust the results of the key light diffuse and specularity for each. I am going to keep it simple and leave it alone and just produce a single key pass scene file for the lot of three craft.

We now need to set up our saving options and render buffer exports which will split the Key Light out to Diffuse Color and Specular Color buffers and save the results to OpenEXR format along with the "Final Render" result, an alpha channel and any other special buffers that I would like to select. This is where I will delve into the OpenEXR plug-in saver from db&d called exrTrader for Lightwave 3D.

One Light Wonder!

See how I only have a single light in the scene? Also notice my settings. In the old days you would turn on and off the Affect Diffuse and Affect Specular buttons and save out separate scene files for each and render them independently from one another.
A massive waste of time when you have renderbuffer export technology like exrTrader!

YOU CAN FIND OUT MORE ON THE OPENEXR FORMAT HERE

Check out the db&w OpenEXR Format File Saver with full Lightwave 3D buffer support here.

exrTrader from db&w is an OpenEXR file saver that takes advantage of the different buffers Lightwave's Rendering Engine has and saves those buffers that you can choose out to a single OpenEXR file (*.exr) or to multiple files individually named and stored to individual directories all at once.

If you have exrTrader (its approximately 60.00US and worth every penny) you can find and load it in the Image Processing tab as an Image Filter. Hit F8 to bring up the "Effects" panel and select processing to begin, hit the "Add the image filter" bar and find the exrTrader plug-in in the list. Then select the edit bar and hit properties for that plug-in. A quick note, if you have any other image processing tools in this list, make sure exrTrader is at the end of the list so that the results of those image processing plug-ins and tools are taken into account before the saving process is run during the render step.

You will be presented with a window much like the one here on the right. >>>>

Let's explore this window quickly. By default it comes up and has the "Buffers" Tab enabled and shows you that the Final Render Buffer is enabled. Below that is a description of what that buffer actually is in this case it is the final render of the scene exactly the same as what you would see hen you hit F9 and do a rendering directly in Lightwave Layout. Below that is a drop down box that gives you the ability to load a pre-determined preset of selected buffers and the Pixel Type, plus other settings shown in the area directly below it. Making a preset is a great idea so we will do one here once we turn on the buffers we need, and change a setting or two.

You are going to want the Final Render Buffer on for everything, so leave it "enabled". Change the pixel type however to 32bit Float. I use 32bit float pretty much exclusively now for anything I do in Lightwave even if I don't really needed, because I have found that its better to have it as a choice instead of a 16bit version when it comes to compositing certain elements together. By having those extra bits, you get more "range" out of Lightwave's render right from the get go and that translates more or less in to what most people would associate with "Film Latitude". In the compositing process this means you can push the values in an image with say a Brightness/Contrast tool much further than an 8bit or 16bit image before it clips the limits of the brightest or darkest pixels stored in the image.

Next drop down and select RGB Raw Color. I don't use this buffer in my composites so here we will turn it off by toggling the "Enabled" button so the checkmark is gone. Select each buffer for what you need in your composite. This tutorial is specific to how BSG does their compositing pipeline (or at least should). You may want certain buffers on and others off for use later. Do some experiments on your own to see what each buffer produces as a result in your compositing program.

Keep going so that you are only left with a list much like mine on the right here, ensuring that for each butter you have turned on, that you have 32bit float selected as the pixel type for each one as well.

When you get to "Depth" change your settings for the Minimum and Maximum to 0.0 and 100.00 respectively. Keep the scale at 1.0. I will explain later on how this is helpful down the road in Fusion.

Check your settings again! Should look like mine here to the right. >>>>>>>>

Make sure you chance the "Render Mode" (Layout Only) Menu to "Viper and Save Buffers".

Once you are good to go you can then make a preset by selecting the "Presets" tab on the top of the plug-in window and selecting "save preset". Give this a useful name when you are prompted to do so and hit "Global" so all users can access it. That's probably just you. But what the hell you have to pick something. I suggest making it a name like "KeyLight_Preset_Rfct-Diff-Spec-Lum-Trans-Depth-Alpha" or something along those lines so you know what's turned on in the preset simply by looking at the name of the preset itself. Save that preset and close down the exrTrader window.

 

You can now go back to the render globals panel and under the output tab choose a RGB(A) set of saver options. If you are rendering over a network you will need to choose a saver in the list of savable formats called "OpenEXR Dummy". This saver "tricks" Lightwave's Screamernet rendering engine and various render controllers into waiting for the Image Processing plug-in portion of the exrTrader component to complete and save out a file before shutting down the operation and moving on to a new frame to render.

OpenEXR  Plug-in From db&w - exrTrader. Default Settings on start up.

here is the window for exrTrader again but now shown with only the buffers I need turned on and 32bit Floating point selected as my pixel type.

While you are doing this make sure you select a path for the OpenEXR Dummy Saver to an appropriately named file and folder consistent with your directory structure. Then do a test render and check this directory to see if indeed you have things set up right.

Once your test render is complete you can open it in Fusion5 and check out the results selecting the different buffers visible there, or you can check it out with TV Player (google that) or a similar OpenEXR compatible format viewer that supports individual selection of OpenEXR layers.

(Check to make sure it rendered a frame correctly!)

Now that you have your Key Pass scene set up, save it again and then put it on the network stack for rendering while be break out our next scene. If you don't have a farm available, just move on and render out the scenes on your own spare time.

Under the render Globals Output Tab, select the OpenEXR Dummy Saver. Click the tumb nail below to see!

Our next step is to break out the "Fill Light" Pass. A fill light pass in Battlestar Galactica terminology is simply to make use of the "spinning light" trick to fake a Radiosity style render. This light set up isn't hard to build when you understand what it needs to do. For the purposes of this tutorial I am not going to get into how to build one. I am going to just include one! Ah yes! Straight from the archives of light rigs from Battlestar Galactica to you, comes the 24fps 28 Distant Light Scalable Intensity Cluster. Tim Albee and I actually re-built the original spinning light clusters that Galactica was originally using in-house because that one was producing some questionable results, producing frame flickering and texture popping on some models.

You can download this LWS scene here. You are free to use it as you please! Just use it correctly.

It is designed for 24fps Lightwave Scenes. You can load it into your existing scenes or fresh with a model to test it out by choosing "Load Items from Scene" in Layout and choosing all the items in the loader option window. Make sure you select all the lights contained. You can skip the camera however as you won't need it.

You will however need to make sure you have your RT Shadows option is set to on when using this light rig because this is how it works. In addition to this you will need Motion-Blur Enabled to see the results properly. I highly suggest that you open this scene up on the side and check out how it works and the render times it can bring in vs. full on Radiosity of any type. As the name of the file suggests, this rig is set up so that you can scale the null the lights are parented to and they increase or decrease in their intensity. This makes it adjustable for any scene needs you might encounter. Very handy indeed!

Check out the screen shot of the Spinning Light loaded on its own into Layout. Study this scene closely and try it out.

I am going to go ahead and load this rig into my Key Pass Scene instead of re-loading the Scene Master and then going through the process of removing the engine and cockpit lighting for speed reasons. The reason for this is that when you are working with several dozen shots and have to move fast, its quicker to go from the break out of the Key Pass and then build your Fill Pass from that. Typically the two longest renders for a shot on BSG are going to be the key and fill passes. So I like to get them in there first. Especially the Key Pass because I can use it once it's done to start blending the layers found in the OpenEXR file immediately and then as the Fill pass comes off the network completed, I can throw that in to my composite and while making those tweaks my interactive and volumetric lighting is cooking and those are usually fast renders. Remember, this is about speed and efficiency in a render pipeline while remaining flexible. If it turns out I have to change the position of the Key Light in my Key Light Pass after it's rendered, no problem! I can simply make that change after seeing the render results and make that determination immediately if its required or not after it goes through render while everything else for my passes is probably fine and doesn't need any changes. This is the benefit of doing shot break outs in the first place.

Once I have my Fill Light Rig loaded into my Key Pass I need to remove the Key Light or disable its affect specularity or affect diffuse or disable it in the Scene Editor. I like to get rid of it completely. The main reason why is that even though its disabled if you leave it in a scene, it still takes time for LW to make that determination during render and time to load the scene up itself. On large projects, leaving unnecessary "gack" in your scene even if it's hidden, disabled or turned off is still going to take time to load and the render engine still has to evaluate that condition, and while it may seem trivial, it can add up to a lot of time really fast. One thing I learned on BSG through my own observations (since I used to have to spend hours watching packet dumps from ScreamerNet nodes live in action to make sure things were rendering correctly since LA consistently produced inconsistence scene files for their break outs from pass to pass, shot to shot), its absolutely critical to make sure you have clean scenes. What I mean but this is straight forwards. Don't use multi-layer objects unless you absolutely have to. Single Layer objects load faster, and can be moved around in a Lightwave scene to the position they need to be in 3D space before the actual rendering process begins quicker than multi-layer objects. Don't think this matters?? Well grab a stop watch the next time you do a ScreamerNet render and watch the on-screen data presented to you. Time how long it takes to load a multi-layered object and then move it before you see the statement from ScreamerNet that its "rendering Opaque Polygons" and then make a note of it. Do the same test again with all the layers of that object brought down to a single layer and see how much of a difference there is. You will be very surprised on large shots with huge objects how much of a difference this makes. In some cases on BSG it consumed upwards of 90% of the rendering time per frame. I cannot stress how important this is! Get into the habit when you build your objects to reduce them to the absolutely minimum amount of layers you need to make it work for your scene.

Now that I have my key light deleted, I am going to save this scene file as my fill pass. Don't worry, I am going to go back and change my save out and OpenEXR buffer saver settings immediately once I have saved this scene with the proper file name.
 

Blow away your Key Light once you have your Spinning Light Rig Loaded!

Now that my scene file is saved as a "Fill Pass" using the same file naming conventions I described above, I need to change my OpenEXR Buffer Saver Options and the Saving Path for the Dummy OpenEXR Saver.

For a "Fill Pass" I am going to use slightly different settings in my OpenEXR Trader buffers than I did in the Key Pass, as I typically don't need to have all of the same buffers selected, so lets do that now. I am also going to make a "Fill Pass Preset" while I am at it so I can save time later.

Go back to the Image Processing Tab (Press F8 and select processing and hit properties on the exrTrader Plug-in in the list below the Add Image Filter drop down menu bar, by right clicking on the plug-in instance and selecting properties).

(Check out the options I selected for my fill pass)

Once I have my buffers selected, I am going to close this down, go to the Render Globals panel again do three things. First, I am going to change my saving path for the exrTrader OpenEXR Dummy and use an appropriate folder and file name with revision number for this render to be saved out as under the Output Tab. The other is to go to the "RenderTab" and turn off Ray Trace Reflection, while leaving Ray Trace Shadows on because I have to have it on in order to achieve the correct "faked radiosity results".
The reason why I turn off the RayTrace Reflection Options here for this type of scene is two fold. One, I already get my reflection lighting out of the Key Pass and two it will save me rendering time.

In some situations you may want to opt to leaving it on. After all "global lighting" does produce reflections that you might want to incorporate into your composite and by using a fill cluster like I have here, it produces those reflections accurately through transparent surfaces and doesn't "pick up" the back ground like in backdrop or image world radiosity/HDRI rendering set ups do on those surfaces which are difficult to deal with later on. In a more advanced tutorial I will show you how to work with those kinds of Radiosity render set ups.

The third and last thing I am going to do is turn off Particle Blur. Since there are no particles in the scene and even if I was breaking out a "Particle Pass" I would only need particle blur on for that pass only. Making a fill pass for volumetric particles specifically volume particles or sprites is for the most part stupid and a huge waste of time. In some scenes though, depending on what kind of object you are working with it might be needed to have it turned on if you have single point polys in your object for some unknown reason (usually a mistake) that need to be blurred as well.

Once I have completed this portion of this step, I can now save this scene again. And move on. But first lets check out the results of what this "Fill Pass" Light rig is going to look like for my shot by doing a test render.

This frame rendered with my scene settings in about 7m54s on my system. Not bad at all. Certainly worth it if you save out to OpenEXR format because now I have the full range of the image available to me vs. just an 8Bit TGA that "mullet man" insists is "enough". It's not and he knows it. He just doesn't like EXR format because he can't load it into combustion and can't see the results. It's not my fault Combustion doesn't support it! Dinosaur apps from Autodesk/Discreet are no reason to take offense over this buddy.

Anyway, check out my frame here taken from the "Final Render Buffer".

FILL PASS FRAME RENDER - 7m54s!

Looks a lot like a radiosity render doesn't it? Dammed rights it does and renders fast and clean and also is full 128bit! That means a 32bit Alpha Channel, and 32bits of Color per channel as well. But it doesn't stop there. I also have buffers in there too and its all contained in one nice package.

Now that I have a good test render, I am again going to save this scene (maybe with another revision number, good to do) and proceed with the rest of the break outs after I toss this scene file onto my network.

 

I am going to now reload my Scene Master, and delete all the lights in it with the exception of the Cylon Raider Engines. I also need to nuke the stars. We will do those last. But don't forget them!

I also need to delete the light for the Cylon Raider Eye and the luminous "eye objects" that make the eye look like it streaks from side to side with a lag.

Remember, the Colonial Viper's engines need to be color corrected later in compositing to change them from yellow/orange as they normally appear straight out of Lightwave 3D to the series standard of blue-ish/coral.

It's much easier to do a shot break out from this point by going back to the scene master and reloading it rather than pulling the engine rigs in to my key or fill pass and then bolt them onto the ships. Same goes for the eye. It's simply faster and cleaner plus you always ensure you are putting things in the exact same place each time because you are not actually "putting things in" you are removing things already there from what effectively is a template.

KAT =^..^=

Let's check it out.

(Click the image to check out my Raider Engine Pass)
 

One last thing though, which I always have setup regardless, because its a default scene attribute that I use no matter what, just to be save, is that I have "Flare2Alpha" inserted just above the exrTrader Suite. This will ensure I have an alpha channel to work with for my engines or any other flare/volumetric properties to these lights and that the Flare2Alpha Image Processing Plug-in takes effect before the saving step does in exrTrader, capturing the results in the final render buffer image.

Now that I have this pass ready to go, I can move on to the next step. But first, save my scene something consistent with my file naming conventions, and throw it onto the network for render.

(Click here for the screen shot of just the Cylon Raider Eye represented in OpenGL in Lightwave Layout.)

Ok so I am back after a few days of playful glee after my copy of Worley Labs Fprime3 was releaed to me. OH WOW!

Kats love Fprime!

Continuing on now, I have my RaiderEye Pass and the Engines for the Raider as well rendered out. Let's take a look quickly at the results of the Eye put into my composite.

(Click the Image for a Larger View showing the Eye in the Composite, not much to see for the raider engines because of the current point of view, but they are in there for the Raider)

Now let's take a look at a screen capture of Fusion5 to see how this flow is looking so far.

(Make note of my Film Grain Settings and how I have my FG/BG Merge Settings for each pass as I stack the layers together)

Let's get back now to finishing up our shot break outs in Lightwave so we can get the rest of this composite happening!

I am going to start with the Engines first since those are more sexy than "helmet lights". Unless your into helmet or something. I don't know. Don't ask don't tell right?

Ok, back to the Scene Master! Once I have it reloaded I am immediately going to blow away the Engines, Eye Light and Eye Lum' Objects for the Raider. I am going to keep the raider itself in the shot here just in case it passes in front of the engines and they are being obscured. I probably could blow it away, but for the purposes of the tutorial I am going to just keep it in there. I also need to remove the Helmet and Cockpit Lighting Rigs, the Key Light, and stars.

Once I have all that taken care of I again need to set my saving path for the Dummy EXR Saver in the render globals panel and then set my buffer saver options in the exrTrader Plug-in itself. Remember to insert "flare2alpha" before the buffer saver though in the image processing list or you won't get any alpha channel for your "engines" since they are technically a kind of a lens flare to Lightwave.

This time around I am going to only use the following buffers.

SELECTED BUFFERS FOR ENGINE PASS (VIPERS)

• Final Render (32bit Float)
• Alpha (32bit Float)
• Diffuse Color (32bit Float)
• Specular Color (32bit Float)
• Luminosity (32bit Float)
• Transparency (32bit Float)
• Dr. Pepper (Makes a Great Float)

(Let's Check out a screen shot just for fun!)

Staying in form, we can again save this pass out using appropriate "namage" and throw it onto the farm.

KAT =^..^=

I am going to use the same buffer settings for my exrTrader plug-in as I used on the engines. Once that's set up and I have my saving path set, I can save this pass out as my "Cockpit Lights" pass and again, throw it into render.

You can see this process gets faster now that you have built up a memory of where things are and how to get rid of them. You just have to remember what you are actually producing as a pass clear in mind. So as to not confuse myself, I usually have a note pad open on my desktop and check each pass out and make a text file as part of my render farm management process, copying and pasting the names of the final passes, and the paths to them to that notepad and going down the line as I complete my shot break outs, checking things off one by one. This is part of the reason why I go back to a scene master most of the time because I can't look at it and say "oh, I am building a key pass because that's what the file name in the Lightwave window says for my current scene". It's going to say "SceneMaster" in there somewhere so no matter what I am going to know I am building something out of that master, and to not save over top of it.

Let's finish up with the vipers now by breaking out the Helmet Lights.

Viper Helmet Lights:
Still going faster (I actually broke out both these passes before writing this in less than 5 minutes, if that), I reload my SceneMaster to begin. The Viper Helmet Lights Pass needs to have everything for lights (engines, key light etc) taken out of it. I also nuke the stars and the raider eye objects. Again, I use the same exrTrader buffer saver options as before, save my path out and then save this scene file for immediate rendering.

Once I have that done, I need to remove all the lights in the scene but this is probably going to be pretty easy since I have most of the lights parented to objects so when I nuke the objects the lights go with them if you choose to delete the descendants of an object at the same time. BUT WAIT! Lightwave needs to have at least one Light in a Scene at all times. The simplest and fasted way to remove the effects of the last light remaining is to hit the properties panel for the light and turn off affect diffuse and affect spec. Alternatively you could turn the value of the light to 0% or disable it in the scene editor. Choice is yours.

I am not going to use exrTrader for this pass. It's just simply over kill, so I am going to save the stars out as 32bit TGA files. I want the alpha in there for maximum tweak-ability in comp. Once this is done I need to check one thing in my camera panel. And that is to make sure I have changed "Particle Blur" from "Off" to "On". Because my scene master has it off, I only need to turn it on once in this particular set up. Where as if I went the other way, I would have to turn it off 7 times out of 8 passes. Make sense? This is an extreme example, as most of the time you could leave particle blur on and not take a huge hit in render times but you never know. That's why I don't leave it on through all of my scene passes and only enable it for when its required.

Now that this bit is taken care of, I can save out my scene, and get it into render. If you have a network controller that allows shifting priorities of your passes around from lowest to highest and vice versa, throw the stars in at the top or move them to the top of your list. They will render ultra fast and we can pull them into the composite immediately and fell better that space is not some huge empty void. At least in our shot.

Remember, it doesn't matter how big your farm is, if your shots are broken out in a way that your compositors can't make sense of or can't use because its not done right, you are wasting not only render farm time twice over (once for the mistake, once to fix it) you are also wasting your time and your compositing teams time and energy. I got this right away, but on Season III things fell apart really quickly because some of this process went down to a junior in LA (but the guy who trained me was sitting right fucking next to him and they STILL COULDN'T GET IT RIGHT!) - which ended up being more or less a disaster and a huge waste of money when they hired another guy here locally to take the shot break outs off my plate completely. Never put two juniors who don't have any compositing experience let alone fail to understand what they are doing when they are breaking out shots and why certain things need to be done certain ways in a position like this. It's a critical point of failure if you do so and it will fail! Then people start making secret phone calls "while out for a coffee break" blaming you for the whole mess, complaining to the "Ell Ehy" group management people, while bucking for a promotion to pay for additional hormone therapy.

This is part of the reason while I will never by choice work again with a 3D team that doesn't have the ability themselves to comp their own shots and that means from the top down. Scene construction, break out, render management, compositing. In other words Lightwave Generalists who can also composite their shots are worth they weight in gold. Literally. The amount of money BSG pissed away in lost time over mistakes in the shot break out process was and remains absolutely staggering and it affected all of the different internal departments of the VFX team. Management to Compositing. When they started to cut me out of the process, things started to go wonky. You can actually see the change from one episode to the next. Bad Management Choice!

Now that blame is squarely and correctly placed on the shoulders of those responsible I can breathe a bit easier. Although I am still unemployed regardless. But I shall have my revenge! MUHAHAHAHAH!

Next up is Part 2 of this Tutorial which covers the compositing process in Digital Fusion 5.0!