I am a geek

Just spent a few hours making my Excel batch file generator work. I hope that turns out to be time well spent.

It oughta be. Even though I've come to my senses since the last post and realized I don't really feel like setting up 7+ render passes, there's still a few to deal with. Specifically, four:

1) COLOR
2) DIRT
3) MATTE
4) DEPTH/BLUR

Pretty much same as before, except I'm not breaking out foreground and background because I don't need to composite them separately, and it doesn't save any on render time. Rather than try to render backgrounds in advance, I'll just render everything, and re-render if animation changes.

The third one is somewhat new -- it assigns an R,G or B surface shader to any shading groups that are tagged with a custom attribute. I can then pull those channels out in compositing to isolate materials that aren't behaving well in the workflow.

Setting up all those renders would be a royal pain, hence the Excel batch file generator. It's linked directly into my shotlist and derives all the frame counts and camera names from there. I created a grid so I can check off which scenes should render, and which passes I need, plus a manual override for start/end times. All that gets fed straight into another worksheet that formats it all as a batch file.

Then all I have to do is copy and paste, and run it. Sweet!