Good news, in Octane 2020.1.2 DWAA & DWAB lossy EXR compression now also works correctly with cryptomatte passes which now get stored in a lossless format in the same file.
Hey Raphael, thank you for your workflow insights! In regards to the question at the end for the depth converter in After Effects: I always use an Adjustment Layer on the top of the Comp with the Levels effect and set the "Clip To Output White" to "On". This way the Media Encoder interprets the colors the right way and you dont need to use a 8 or 16 bit effect. Hope this helps!
@@SilverwingVFX Yeah man, I was especially impressed with how you rendered your light passes and able to adjust each one individually! I think Corona is capable of this as well, and now I am kicking myself for not doing it sooner. Crazy how much more control you can get. I'm on the final stretch of finishing a huge project. It's been a constant struggle lighting areas that get blown out. Wish I would have known about the light pass technique sooner haha. Thanks again!
@@mattrittman Yeah that´s a great way to comp. I have done this with my Gameboy and whenever I had a bad reflection because of a light I just animated it to blend off and on for that section and it worked great. If you want to even go a step further you can add ACES on top of that workflow and you will have even better highlight handling. I have a tut on this workflow as well. Cheers and happy rendering to you!
@@SilverwingVFX Oh wow okay, I will have to watch your video on the ACES workflow as well! I tried ACES briefly in Corona and it seemed to make the image very high contrast, but I think I need experiment more with it. I hear people talking about how great it is all the time! Can’t imagine how complex your game boy video probably was in AE haha. This AR15 animation is 8½ minutes long, and even it is pretty complex. I’m super burned out and it’s taking a toll on my mental health. I don’t think I could do another video this long again. I don’t know how people do it 😩.
I think the small difference between all the light passes together and the main render is because you are using Add as blending mode instead of linear dodge. Very good video btw, thanks!
How do you set up something like these little lights inside the object? I thought it is emission but then you wouldn't be able to use it as part of light pass right ? What would be best to use for emissive materials? Thanks!
In Octane you can declare any emission as part of a light group. There is a "Light pass ID" in the Emission node. I usually use Octane Diffuse for Emission. If I do Screens where you also need a reflection on top I am using the universal material. Hope that helps. Cheers and a great start into the week for you!
Great video! Well done as always ;) I have one question... Even if we don't use the "Save" tab of C4D to save the image, but so we still need to set the EXR file format and 32bit inside that tab as you have done? Thanx
Hi there. You can set the C4D output to whatever you want. It does not influence the Octane output. I just have preset C4D in a way to give me EXRs from the start. So every new scene I make is setup like this.
@@SilverwingVFX I've noticed that if I enable "Blend Colors Using 1.0 Gamma" in After Effects, I get bad alpha edges on my render, if I disable it everything turns fine, but of course the light passes are not ok. Do you know why? Thank you.
@@NicolaPezzoli1990 If you are using straight alpha "unpremultiplied alpha" (which should be always done for cleaner edges in alpha situations) you need to "Interpret footage" in after effects. Right klick on the image sequence and then hit "interpret footage" then set your alpha from "premultiplied" to "straight" Hope this helps!
@@SilverwingVFX Great! Thank you very much! That was the problem..... I've notice that everytime I import an EXR it always set the "premultiplied" parameter, so I figure out to change the "interpolation Rules" file, so now when I import an EXR it automatically set the "straight" alpha parameter. Thanx again, you rock ;)
Hi Raphael! Thank you for this great talk! Do you happen to have this recording in higher quality? It's a little hard to see since it's only 360p. But again, thanks!
RU-vid is still converting it in the Background. If you come back in about 30 minutes it should be available in 2k Thanks for your patience in the meantime :-)
@@AnimalThe2nd Normally its faster. RU-vid seems slow today. Vimeo already managed to transcode it. You can watch it there if you want: vimeo.com/404541700
Thanks for this :) very informative. I noticed you do not use linearize working space but instead use the blend using 1.0 gamma checkbox. this means only layer blend modes work in linear gamma but everything else (like effects) will work in srgb gamma. did you do it on purpose? this will mean that realistic results might not be as easy to accomplish. on the other hand, linearizing Ae's color space takes getting used to...
Hi and thanks a lot for your comment. I indeed back then did not use linearize working space. This was because the e.g. the curves effect is rather hard to handle in linear space. But since I switched to ACES there is no way around using proper linarization as you suggest! Thanks again for pointing that out! Cheers!
You can export it in 32bit of course. But you can´t watch it with any normal picture viewer / video player and if its a video is usually heavily compressed 8bit. HDR being the exception with 10bit. Exporting in 32bit mostly makes sense if you delivering to HDR color grading which then will save the files with 10 bit + HDR metadata.
Thank you for this walkthrough, Raphael, more useful than what I thought. I'm a long-time Octane user, I've tried Redshift but I didin't like too much and discarded it. May I ask your opinion about these 2 rendering engines, how do they compare? I see Redshift being used more and more from a lot of production companies. Thank you!
If you trying to figure out what render engine is the best of you the best person to deciede that is you. I am with you in the observation that more and more studios are switching to Redshift. I can imagine that this is mostly because Redshift can be integrated into existing pipelines then Octane. And based on my observations its more stable then Octane currently. I personally like Octane for its uncompromising render quality and simple setup. But as I said in the beginning the best way to know what you should use is to test it yourself and maybe look around what studios you want to work with and what renderer they are using.
Thank you Raphael! After a while I wached this video again, and every time it is so helpful. Besides I have a question to you. How do you denoise your Light Passes? This has been a Problem in some Projects for me. Any suggestions? :)
To my knowledge this is just not possible to have denoising on other channels then the beauty and the channels that contributed to it (e.g. diffuse, reflection, refraction etc. So single light passes are unfortunately not available in a denoised version. I personally never denoise my final render. I use neat video in comp if there is remaining noise.
Nice video Raphael. Btw why don't you set up color working space in AE and linearize it? It will also enable gamma 1.0 for blending. As far as i know it's better to set up even if you use linear files for compositing. Also why do you use solids as adjustment layers?
Hi there and thanks for your comment. Yes you should setup color spaces if you work for any define workflow e.g. TV production in rec709. I guess for me its more then anything else a ghost of the past back when it was more usual to setup AE this way. You could argue since I am producing for the internet so I sattle for the smallest standard sRGB. About the adjustment layers: Adjustment layers are just solids. I am just trying to be resourceful. You do not need 5 different adjustment layers if you use one solid for all of them. Also when eventually changing scale of the project, you need to change one solid and all the adjustment layer solids will pick it up.
@@SilverwingVFX Thanks for answer, great trick with solids. But if for example you need to composite linear files with 8 bit files, if you dont set your color working space AE doesn't know how to linearize low dynamic range files with "gamma" encoded. (unless you put color profile converter effect on each file) It's simply not avalible on footage panel. But you can assign profiles to files most of the time when you set up color space and do linear compositing operations with 8 bit files such as blurs, dof, glow. It will give you a different result even if you ticked blend gamma 1.0. And what i've noticed even with linear files like exr you will get a little bit different composite if you leave it just to assume 2.2 and if you set sRGB and linearize it. I think it uses HDR values more correcrtly. Once again great video.
@@1ne336 Hi and thank you very much for your insight. That could answer one of my questions that I have during the video why comping light layers over each other looks slightly different. I think I will use the sRGB profile with linearized color space in the future. Thanks for sharing those insights with me! Usually I am working in FullCG workflows where everything I am comping was 32bit. That might explain why I did not encounter any big differences "Blend Colors Using 1.0 Gamma" and adding a proper color profile with linearized workspace.
That is also how i work. I think 1NE Is right, also i think you should use linear dodge instead of add. Anyway thank you raphael, always top stuff, really helpful!!
Thank you very much for your comment. Fantastic to hear that the video was helpful to you! Fingers crossed you can retain it. In the worst case scenario you know the video and can watch it again. And also ask questions in the comments if needed 🙌
Thanks so much that was so informative! Im still at a loss though and i hoped copying your settings exactly would let me find my problem but it didnt. Im working in linear, set everything the same way you did but in picture viewer and in AE it looks like its been converted to 8 bit sRGB (blown out highlihgts, contrasty and oversaturated). Any idea what could be the problem?
Just go on Instagram and search for content you like and then write those people nicely. Explain what you have in mind and tell them your budget. With my network of 3D professionals, chances are high that you will find all of them overpriced ;-) Since 3D motion design is much more work then one might think. It´s mostly underplayed unfortunately even if it seems expensive!
