Hey!
About
I’ve only got experience in the game industry but I’d like to have a grasp on how the film industry works as well!
To get a better understanding I’m actually working on a pretty ambitious home project where I’ll be rendering a CG sci-fi battle scene. My script and storyboards are done and I’m about to enter pre-vis stage.
Now I’ve done quite alot of research on how the film industry works and all the departments there is to it and anything there is to know about upstream / downstream.
Problem
Flexibility is my main goal, if a problem occurs I don’t want it to screw the pipe.
So let’s start with assets.
An asset can be a character, tank, weapon, prop, environment etc.
Each asset is composed of a model scene, rig scene with proxy mesh and a shader scene from look-development.
Now my idea was to have a master asset file that references the model scene, rig scene and the shader scene and everything is hooked together. When the master scene is published it’s placed inside a “published” folder with all the references collapsed / imported. Republishing an asset would replace that same file. This might be familiar with most of the guys in the film industry.
Then we have the sequences and shots. Each shot is composed of a layout scene, animation scene, simulation scene, lighting scene and rendering scene. Those scenes would reference assets from the “published” folder and nowhere else.
My goal here is to only have the animation scene reference a rigged asset, and all the other scenes would use point cache data that animation spits out. The reason for this is, lighting, simulation, rendering is not concerned about rig and controls.
But there is a conflict with my “master asset” file idea since it already contains the rig in it, which I’d like to get rid of for the sim, lighting, rendering scenes, and deleting is a no-no to me after referencing the “master asset”. This introduces a second master asset file (render master asset) which only contains the geometry that can receive the point cache data that animation spat out.
This is kinda where I’m getting lost and I have no experience in the film industry. How do you guys make sure everything is flexible as possible all the way from modeling to rendering. I’m fine all the way into animation, but from there on I’m kinda not happy with my solution where I have two master files for each asset where one is the rigged for animation dept and the other is the same asset with the rig stripped for point cache.
Besides this, how do you handle the rendering scene? You most definately don’t want the render mesh in the viewport, do you guys just keep it hidden using a layer? Or do you at rendertime use a script to switch out all low / mid poly references to a high poly version? Or do you guys use mental ray render proxy scenes that you export out to .mi? (best for memory since maya doesn’t load the mesh, only mental ray does)
How could we introduce the new maya asset system into this, hiding, black boxing, locking geometry and unnessesary nodes in the asset container seems like a smart thing to do but can you still read / write point cache from it?
I’d like to hear how this could be managed in a simple and effective way.