Avatar Rendering of the Na'vi...no render passes?

[El Burritoh]

I just heard something interesting and I must ask about it...

In an interview, someone from Weta said that you guys didn't render out the customary render passes for the Na'vi, but instead rendered out the equivalent of a beauty pass only, giving the impression that no external comping was required (unlike what was done on District 9 for example).

Is this true? And if so, was all that done with Renderman alone?

[PascalR]

I didn't work in shots myself, but I heard that was not far from the truth indeed :)

[El Burritoh]

I didn't work in shots myself, but I heard that was not far from the truth indeed :)

I have to know more about this! :bouncy:

Maybe you know this, maybe not, but did they render out to a single file that contained framebuffers or something? Something like a multi-channel EXR? This would still give some room in post but would be far less confusing. I can't imagine they didn't leave themselves some way of making adjustments post-render!

Anyone here work on rendering the Na'vi?

[bneall]

if it was all frame-buffer passes then why bother only using the beauty portion. Seems like a waste of proc power. I've been doing alot of my skin shader in beauty, all you really need is a few additional passes to tweak.. my guess is they did the majority of the diffuse, color, and sub surface all in 1 pass. It certainly makes it easier and looks good without having to re do all the math.

[ZippZopp]

pretty interesting and I can see this being possible as you can get a lot direct from the beauty and you can keep a consistent look. I did experiment with outputting all of my sss layers so I could comp them and at the end of the day it was a bit overkill.

i tend to agree with ben, you could probably get a lot of mileage out of the beauty and use a few additional passes to finish the job off

[tiktok]

wha?! crazy. I guess if you have everything already tuned perfect, no need for passes? very cool. :beerchug:
-Bayard