Daz Octane and After Effects workflow with Motion Capture

[rjandron]

Good morning everyone.

Here's a video that I rendered out using the Octane Plugin for Daz|Studio that uses some of our motion capture for animation. Some observations:

http://youtu.be/ceN-jrPGiC4

(Edit: I had some difficulty embedding the video. Click on the URL above to watch.)

1. Octane fits very easily into the production workflow, although as an unbiased renderer, it gives more of a temptation to do everything "in camera" as opposed to rendering in layers and bringing it all together in compositing software.

2. It does take some pre-planning, but rendering out illumination from each light source separately gives a lot more flexibility in applying effects. The primary illumination was done using an HDR image. Illumination for the muzzle flash was done by first creating a muzzle flash prop as an OBJ file and parenting that to the rifle's muzzle. Then, this was turned into a light emitter and the frames where the shot happens were rendered out with the emitter opacity set to zero. This gave the illumination without the emitter being visible in the scene. By rendering out only those frames where a gunshot occurs and compositing those with the main footage in After Effects, I was able to create the "flash" without burning any more render time than needed.

3. Any motion blur was done in After Effects using the Re-Vision FX Reelsmart Motion Blur plugin. No suprises - it does play nicely with Octane footage.

4. Since the render was done using pathtracing, there was a lot of noise in the vehicle glass. I used Octane to render out an alpha channel of just this object and used that to composit in a layer with the noise reduced using the built-in Remove Film Grain plugin from After Effects. This beats the option of cranking up the samples and exponentially increasing the render time and preserves the detail in the rest of the image.

I've been using the Octane plugin for Daz ever since it was released - I can't imagine doing renders without it now.