Could it be... good news?

Yay, something worked!

How low my expectations have become.

But seriously, this is good. I've devoted this weekend to hammering out various little issues that have to be dealt with, and one big one is automating my render workflow. I've known for a while now that I'm going to be rendering this this out in passes -- 1) a background color pass to start next week, and 2) a character/prop color pass as each scene gets finaled in animation. Unfortunately, since there are a few reflective surfaces in the scene (primarily the table) and soft shadows, I'll need to revisit the backgrounds with 3) a reflection/shadow pass after animation.

But in addition to that, the compositing techniques I've come up with necessitate a few more: 4) a dirtmap pass, which is a key part of the overall look of this piece, and 5) a depth/blur pass, to give me better control at compositing time and to add depth of field effects. Each of these two passes involve dropping a specific shader on every single object in the scene and re-rendering. Which means it has to be done for both the 6) background and 7) character/props.

So when you add that all up, 40 shots times 7 passes equals... a lot. I'm not as concerned about the impact on render time, as the depth and dirtmap passes render very quickly. But going through and replacing all those shaders by hand for each pass, or saving out multiple versions of each scene and keeping them synced up with any changes? Bleccch.

Scripting to the rescue! I've written a quickie MEL script that will go through an entire scene and replace every objects shader with another one. Best of all, using a batch file it can be executed only at render time, so it makes no permanent changes to the scene.

And it works!

Combine that with some other batch file trickery I've done, including using Excel to generate batch files straight from my shot list, and queuing up all those render passes should be much, much easier. Of course, it won't prevent all the last minute scramblings and re-renders, etc. But it helps a lot.