I know it is a little bit late. But, renderStacks had a 2-year-old birthday last month!
To celebrate the birthday, we had an interview with our awesome user, Ignacio Mullor.
Who are you, awesome renderStacks user? Please introduce yourself.
My name is Ignacio Mullor, I’m a Freelance CG creator from Barcelona located in Japan at the moment.
I’m in a freelance unit with my partner and we usually, often alongside other freelancers, do some client work. I am also in contact with Japanese and abroad companies if there are exciting and challenging projects around.
I had to learn how to build my own server and develop some good online workflows so we can work remotely in a convenient way. Effectiveness is the key when resources are limited!
In addition to my client work I’m also actively developing “personal projects / original content”.
Talk to us about your typical project. What do you do?
I’m afraid I don’t have a “typical” project, I like new challenges so I jump from Commercials, to Videogames, Anime, LookDev, Big Events, Theme Park Attractions, VR…
My role in each project is very flexible too, I can be leading some small group of artists for an event CG experience with a 360º screen with 16000x2000px screens/projections, or I can be with the look development department of a video game for a big studio, doing some VR experience for an indie project, or taking care of some shots for some very trendy Anime.
My typical job then, would be to make something happen in the smoothest possible way for everyone involved, making it look as cool as it can be. Sorry I tried my best to be specific but… it is what it is 🙂
What kinds of other render/scene management solutions have you used before? If so, what made you use renderStacks?
I started with the veteran RPM, Vexus and Max native State Sets, and in between some other less popular tools.
RPM was fine but was aging fast. Vexus was great too but node base is not fast enough sometimes, and every exception in the pass management would become a “noodle festival” even if I tried to keep it as clean as possible. Then State Sets… don’t even get close to that, please! very bad experiences with it.
So when I first heard about RenderStacks I was immediately interested in it because the “modifier based” method seemed faster to set up than every other solution I’ve tried before.
How is renderStacks helping your job?
Being generic I would say reliability and speed, and then in more detail I would add that thanks to RenderStacks we could challenge projects that seemed way too massive for a handful of artists, with crazy lengths, resolutions, or amount of scenes… so, empowerment is the word?
You stop thinking about rendering problems, and start focusing on how it all looks.
Especially the very short span commercial works, where a single miss in a render before a tight delivery can be critical. Renderstacks has been there to deliver every single time, and if there has been some punctual issue, Quasicrystal reaction time has been amazing too.
What was the best feature of renderStacks for you?
Ease of setup, automatic naming rules for the EXR exports. Recently added “groups” are also awesome, they give the extra power that only node-base ways could do before but now in a very compact modifier way. “Visibility Modifier” the (OS) Object Selection mode, I’m addicted to that one, you can add and remove layers, selection sets, and others… at will from just one single list, no more “let’s add all to a selection set just in case” you can have your scene very organized in layers and use it as it is.
The 1 click preview button, VFB settings capture, custom MaxScript execution, The list goes and goes…
Do you have any example of a project which renderStacks really helped?
RenderStacks has been helping with all of my most recent commercials, events, and games. In every single one of them it made the rendering process fast and easy.
A more precise answer could be some anime production where every background is a drawing and gets camera mapped to simplified objects in the background, then it needs to be exported in an endless amount of render passes to be composited later, all that layers create this parallax effect when moving.
Renderstacks was awesome for this matter, we could set up 1 scene, and then from there it was as easy as to just drop objects in the right layer folder and would get rendered with the proper lights, exported in the right place with the right name and ready for compositing. Again, you forget about render settings and start paying attention to the looks.
What do you want to say to the future renderStacks user?
If you need to handle big projects with an small team, or individuals that want to have easy control over your scenes render passes, or “big” companies that need a reliable way to handle passes where the artist just needs to drop stuff on the right “layer folder” and press a button… then RenderStacks is for you.
I can understand that the amount of options can be intimidating at the beginning, but focus on the basics first, for example : “cameras”, “lights” and “visibility” and then later add “matte objects”, “render elements” and from there adding more modifiers at your pace.
I don’t even use all the options there are in RenderStacks yet, every project I challenge some new options If I need to, and I’m impressed by how much it can accomplish every single time.
Give it a try ( it’s free for non-commercial use ) and in less than 1h of formation you will see how convenient and how much it will accelerate your workflow.
https://www.artstation.com/stabatproj3 || Twitter: @stragalet || Instagram: @stragalet || www.ignaciomullor.com