wish list for animation workflow

[designgestalt]

for the first time I was doing a more complex animation (beyond turntable and transition) with multiple scenes and I came across some very annoying and time-consuming facts, so here is a wishlist especially regarding the animation workflow:

1) PLEASE, PLEASE create sub-folders for the passes when rendering animations !!!!! when you render out more than one pass (i.e. depth, ao, normals etc.) KS throws all the files including the png´s into one folder. try to import that chaos into AE ...
since the windows explorer does not help organizing this (date or alphabetical order does not help here), you basically have to to it manually with the search function... very annoying (anyone have a better idea??)

2) Studios:
it would be great, if studios would contain the "Lighting Presets" as well. In this case you could get everything ready and in the Animation render tab you could than only just add the studios you wish to render. Since I always work in "Performance Mode" and most of the times I use customized lighting presets, I always have to double check, if the studio is set up with the correct preset, before adding it to the queue. this would help for still images as well!!
Ideally you could also set up the frame range  you want to render out in a specific studio ! In this case you can almost "bake" an animation scene with a dedicated studio.
3) PLEASE, PLEASE create a better control for the Camera Path.
it is not only a nightmare to work with it, it fact it is just out of control...
it simply can not be used in a professional way at the moment! this feature could add so much more life to your animations, but I doubt it is hardly used at the moment. A Gizmo to control the path would do the job!
So as long as it is not possible to import a Camera path from another software, please re-work at least this feature !!

4) give us more control over the animation timeline:
when you have more complex animations, it makes a ton of sense to group them in folders to easier navigate through the timeline tree. but there is just one color for a folder, which is yellow (??), which means, if I put my camera animation into a folder it has the same color as all the other folders with part animations ? this makes it very annoying to navigate through complex scenes! please let us choose colors for the folders !!

5) THE DEPTH PASS !!!!!!
Jesus Christ, this is the biggest of all nightmares..... !!!
I cannot say how much time I spent, fiddling around with this ...UNBELIEVABLE !!!!
It comes out as a plain white pass and needs an unbelievable amount of time and patience to reveal its content !!
who ever has done this, surely knows what I am talking about ...
however you desperatly need this pass, if you want to add a "depth of field" in post production!
I am sure a better control over the focal length of the camera would already solve this problem !
i.e. in Cinema4D you can control the "Clipping Range" as I would call it, with a Gizmo.
So it basically a digital property, you place you product in and it clips information that is outside of this field. In this case your "Histogram" is not infinite. you still have to do some adjustments and finetuning before using it in post but the range you work in is much more defined!


there are quite a few more suggestions, I will complete this over time ...
thanks for your patience ....

designgestalt

[INNEO_MWo]

Hello Designgestalt.

Your request "1) PLEASE, PLEASE create sub-folders for the passes when rendering animations !!!!! when you render out more than one pass (i.e. depth, ao, normals etc." was discussed some days ago, when Eugen Fetch called vor multi-layer.exr files. So he organized the pass-files in subfolders. And to get this subfolders more easily, I created a simples batch script.

So you just has to create a batch(.bat) filde in the frame folder or copy one, if you already have one.

The script is:


set passtype=ao
if exist .\*_%passtype%.* md .\%passtype% | move *_%passtype%.* .\%passtype%
set passtype=caustics
if exist .\*_%passtype%.* md .\%passtype% | move *_%passtype%.* .\%passtype%
set passtype=depth
if exist .\*_%passtype%.* md .\%passtype% | move *_%passtype%.* .\%passtype%
set passtype=diffuse
if exist .\*_%passtype%.* md .\%passtype% | move *_%passtype%.* .\%passtype%
set passtype=gi
if exist .\*_%passtype%.* md .\%passtype% | move *_%passtype%.* .\%passtype%
set passtype=label
if exist .\*_%passtype%.* md .\%passtype% | move *_%passtype%.* .\%passtype%
set passtype=lighting
if exist .\*_%passtype%.* md .\%passtype% | move *_%passtype%.* .\%passtype%
set passtype=normals
if exist .\*_%passtype%.* md .\%passtype% | move *_%passtype%.* .\%passtype%
set passtype=raw
if exist .\*_%passtype%.* md .\%passtype% | move *_%passtype%.* .\%passtype%
set passtype=reflection
if exist .\*_%passtype%.* md .\%passtype% | move *_%passtype%.* .\%passtype%
set passtype=refraction
if exist .\*_%passtype%.* md .\%passtype% | move *_%passtype%.* .\%passtype%
set passtype=shadow
if exist .\*_%passtype%.* md .\%passtype% | move *_%passtype%.* .\%passtype%
set passtype=clown
if exist .\*_%passtype%.* md .\%passtype% | move *_%passtype%.* .\%passtype%


This will create subfolder named like the type of pass and move that files into them.



Hope that helps a bit.

Cheers
Marco

[Eugen Fetsch]

#1
+1 ... it would be great to have a "render in subfolders" checkbox. I struggled for a long time with that issue, till Marco gave me his batch script. Now I don't care much about this topic anymore. 

#2
+1 for that

#3
IMO, that would be an overkill for KS in terms of its high standards on simplicity and the complexity of such type of tool. Just use Blender/Maya/etc. for advanced animations and import them into KS through Alembic or FBX. It will save you and Luxion many headaches You can use basic meshes as dummies and import/export them back and forth. To do a proper import, don't forget to bake your camera animation and use at least one 3d mesh object in the FBX/Alembic file export. Otherwise you'll not get your camera imported into KS.

#5
+1 for a "clamp values" checkbox, that would normalize the z-depth output already during the render.

Cheers
Eugen 

[sleby]

+1 for better camera path control. Some of us work in CAD modellers like Creo and are unable to export camera path since they don't support animations. I don't want to learn blender just because of that.