Hello,

I was just wondering one thing. I know you can render in layers the way that you give specific things on seperate layers, like glow or similar.

But if you have huge scene, say, big city full of trees, all with raytraced shadows, would it be possible to render only trees in one render layer, then the rest of city on seperate layer and too later merge those two in digital fusion or some other soft.? So that this way you could render lots and lots of geomtry? Is this possible, and what kind of issues would i have?

Tnx!

hah, i've asked alot of questions about render layers before :p

have you seen the "how do i render a movie?" sticky thread up there?
ragecgi made a really good video on render layers
there's probably something on area autodesk too

to give a straight answer to your question.... yes
never used digital fusion but if its a compositing tool then yes, you can merge yours layers

you can put all you buildings into one layer and put all your trees in another

the only thing you'll encounter with that is you wont get the shadows of buildings on trees and shadows of trees on buildings.
to do that you would put everything on one layer (or everything you would see) and turn off the render visibility in the render stats for all the buildings or trees.




here is the area autodesk tutorial
https://area.autodesk.com/index.php/t...ayers_in_maya/
not sure if it will help, you have to know maya pretty well...

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that's a "Ch" pronounced as a "K"

Computer skills I should have:
Objective C, C#, Java, MEL. Python, C++, XML, JavaScript, XSLT, HTML, SQL, CSS, FXScript, Clips, SOAR, ActionScript, OpenGL, DirectX
Maya, XSI, Photoshop, AfterEffects, Motion, Illustrator, Flash, Swift3D

Tnx man. I'll take a look at that tutorial.

So, there is no way to have trees on one layer and buildings on second layer, and to render them separately with shadows the way you described?

i suppose not...


if you want the shadows of the trees on the buildings then you put everything onto one render layer (everything that is going to be seen) and turn off the "Primary Visiblity" in the render stats

or if you have lots, you just select them all and go into Window > General Editors > Attribute Spread Sheet and turn their primary visiblity off from there, because it's a lot faster using the spreadsheet than individually selecting each tree and turning them off

if an object doesn't exist in the render layer then the renderer wont know anything about it, so it won't be able to cast the shadows from it, or put it into reflections and all that...

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that's a "Ch" pronounced as a "K"

Computer skills I should have:
Objective C, C#, Java, MEL. Python, C++, XML, JavaScript, XSLT, HTML, SQL, CSS, FXScript, Clips, SOAR, ActionScript, OpenGL, DirectX
Maya, XSI, Photoshop, AfterEffects, Motion, Illustrator, Flash, Swift3D