In this tutorial, we will cover the basics of the Movie Render Graph, talk about the different nodes, and show how to start rendering your shots in layers.
https://dev.epicgames.com/community/learning/tutorials/LpaB/unreal-engine-using-the-movie-render-graph-to-render-in-layers
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In legacy Movie Render Queue, there was the option of rendering on frame steps. Is there a way to do this using Movie Render Graph? It is not immediately apparent. Thanks!
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No but I will put in a request to see if we can get it into 5.5
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Hi Shaun,
That would be great. Just to fill out the thread. Here’s a few ideas I’m hoping get into another version.
- Rather than start frame and end frame, maybe just allow a field that allows certain syntax to make this easier. One could use 1-100 for a continuous range. They could do 1-100:2 for the same range on two’s. They could do “10,15,37,45” for just those frames. The renderer could run through the whole range to make sure sampling and motion blur is accurate, but it would only write out those frames.
There are several reasons why those above are important. While render time isn’t as expensive in real-time, pathtracing can be. Moreover, often you don’t want to hold onto all those frames early on in review. So people can use steps early on to limit that. Also, the reason of the arbitrary individual frames is that a great way to communicate the status of a cinematic, for example, is with a contact sheet. Contact sheets can be representative frames of each shot that give a bird’s eye view of the state of the entire cine at a glance. Those frames can be assembled into a contact sheet image, or just a very brief sequence. So being able to do that would be awesome.
We could use python after the fact, but it just seems wasteful. We’d be creating I/O debt and writing information, that we’d rather not write or render in the first place.
Having that control “seems” reasonable since steps, at least, are current available in the MRQ UI options.
Thanks!
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One more idea…
I couldn’t find a way to do it currently. But it would be great to be able to pull a variable as a token in the output paths. Sometimes we render vdev of assets and being able to query an actor and then use that as a token would be great. Again, we could run a python rename after the fact, but that would be great to add.
Thank again.
Chris
Hi! I’ve been doing some tests with this and ran into a couple issues with using ExponentialHeightFog.
Here is my test scene, everything rendered together for ground truth comparison:
Here is my assembly in Nuke from layers:
Looks pretty good, apart from some differences in the shadows on the chair (I made sure my Lumen screen traces are off) and some edge artifacts caused by the fog layer:
In this case it’s fixable relatively easily with some erodes, but would like to highlight the issue nonetheless.
I am rendering a fog layer separately with the objects in the scene held out, like this:
Looks pretty good, but when I look at the alpha channel I notice some artifacts:
I’m wondering if I am missing something here, some kind of setting that I didn’t turn on. Might be worth also mentioning that the fog layer here is both AtmosphereFog and ExponentialHeightFog combined into one.
Any advice is appreciated!
Hi! Is Tone Curve disabled? And in Nuke are you adding or doing an over?
Tone Curve is disabled, in Nuke I am doing an over with the fog layer, disjoint-over on layers which are held-out against each other for correct edges.
Disjoint over should work but can you try and plus them together?
Plus doesn’t match the render of everything together because in this case the fog is darkening the brighter sky in the background. But it does get rid of the visible artifacting, so it could be considered a solution for certain cases.
Yea i just sadly noticed the abstence of steps when i desperately need it. Also please add a text-field where you can type in non-sequential frame ranges and single frames, ie. “7; 16; 55-78; 110”. Need this a lot in a production workflow.
Cheers