So you want to create a new reel and can't decide if you should just
playblast a bunch of clips together or give your anims the full treatment of lights and
render. You want to playblast because they're a lot easier and quicker, but you also want to render because everything looks so nice fully lit.
Well, what if there was happy medium--something in between? There is!
THE HARDWARE RENDER BUFFER!
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It's the best of both worlds. With the
HRB, it's like playblasting with the added advantage of motion blur and anti-aliasing. Althought, it's actually slightly more work than playblasting, it's definitely a lot quicker than setting up lights and doing full renders.
Here's what you do:
Here are my settings. Use what you like.
Scale as you wish:
View the sequence with the
Fcheck.
If you like what you see, import the images into Quicktime Pro and export an uncompressed clip. Then when all of your clips are exported, throw them into Premier to toss around as you like.
All of my previous reels have only been playblasts (HRB for future ones). My reasoning is that while it definitely is nice to have full renders, the time it takes me to set up lights and render, I rather use that time to polish my animation even further. Plus, if I just finished editing together a reel and realize that I need to fix yet another anim hitch, I'm more likely to make that fix if all I needed to do after is to re-playblast. And although I don't want to speak for everyone, I'm pretty certain that the animators that are looking at your work will be judging it by your characters' motion and performance, and not by their rim lights and cast shadows.
For future reels, I think I'll be using the HRB, unless of course I have a shot that have already been lit from a cinematic sequence.
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While doing these "suped-up playblasts", these are my additional prefs:
- All heads up displays should be turned off--just to keep things clean.
- I actually like having the grid visible as a ground plane. I feel it grounds the character, and in a way, helps with weight because you can anticipate where the foot (for example) is supposed to hit. Without, it's like hitting an invisible wall that you're not ready for. This might be just me, but I find it a bit awkward without a ground plane. It's like the character's floating in space.
- If there's camera movement, the grid acts as points of reference in the environment. This way, you get a better sense of how much the character is moving relative to it's environment and not the screen.I've seen animation tests from film studios and they are all rendered with some sort of a ground plane with a checkerboard texture.
- Finally, I prefer the motion-blur to be subtle. I think it's one of those things that should be felt and not seen.
Here's a final tip--echo all commands in the script editor while setting up the parameters for the render settings and make it a shelve button. It'll save you time if you have 20+ clips to render.
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Now remember as always, this is purely my preference--I have friends who like to render their reels, and I have to admit, it looks quite nice. But I'm stubborn:)--I'll still say that what extra time I have, I'd prefer to use it to nicen' up the actual animation instead.
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