Testimonial - renderStacks

renderStacks 2nd anniversary interview – Ignacio Mullor

renderstacksmaster September 26, 2022 Testimonial 0 Comments

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

1 year anniversary interview with Andy Lewis, the beta tester #1.

renderstacksmaster August 18, 2021 Testimonial 0 Comments

It has been a year since renderStacks has been released. First of all, thanks to all renderStacks users!
We planned to have a big feature announcement. But, the beta testing and documentation is still going on. We will update ASAP when it is ready.

To celebrate 1 year anniversary, we interviewed with our awesome first beta tester Andy Lewis.

Who are you, awesome the first beta tester? Please introduce yourself.

My name is Andy Lewis. I graduated in 2008 with a degree in computer graphics and moved to LA shortly thereafter to work as a texture painter at Rhythm and Hues. Afterward I worked at studios such as FuseFX, Encore Hollywood, a52, FuriousFX, and others. The more I worked, the more I found my niche as a 3D generalist. I’ve always had a personality flaw that causes me to want to take on as much work as possible, and being a generalist is a great way to scratch that itch. After loving my work but having had enough of LA in 2015, I moved to Salt Lake City to work as a 3D generalist, team lead, and Unity developer. I worked with Changsoo for several years at Encore Hollywood and FuseFX. I found that Changsoo always knows best when it comes to pipeline, and I literally had a shirt printed for myself that says I Believe in Changsoo.

Talk to us about your typical project. What do you do?

When I’m working as a generalist, I typically have a half-dozen animations I’m working on at any given time. I’m constantly taking on new work and revising old work. Since late 2009, I think I have had about 3 weeks of downtime in total. I’m always staying as busy as I can. These days I do a lot of medical animations, and I try to relive the glory days in Hollywood by making the medical animations as beautiful and striking as I can manage. I’m also currently doing a lot of VR simulation work within Unity.

What kinds of other render/scene management solutions have you used before?

I’ve used RPM, State Sets, Maya’s render layers, and a few proprietary render pass solutions. Some of these solutions have turned already crappy 70-hour work weeks into hellish 100-hour work weeks (I’m looking at you, Maya). Several all-nighters in my career could have been avoided if not for buggy pass managers.

Since you are the first beta tester, I should ask this. How was it like the first version of renderStacks?

When I first started using renderStacks, I was also using State Sets for most of my render pass work. I was laboring under the illusion that State Sets got a bad rap and weren’t as bad as everyone made them out to be. Perhaps that’s still true to a small degree. But, the moment I started using renderStacks, I immediately knew that my four-year marriage with State Sets was going to end in an abrupt divorce. We had plenty of bugs to work through with the first beta of renderStacks, but it was immediately obvious that the core of renderStacks was immensely flexible and powerful. I was addicted from the get-go.

How is renderStacks helping your job?

First and foremost, I’ve never been able to get it to hard-crash like every other render solution. Even when we were working out the bugs in the initial beta, it was an order of magnitude more stable than anything else I had used. It’s also unbelievably robust, flexible, predictable, and transparent in how it works. We all love 3DS Max for its powerful procedural modifier stack, and renderStacks brings the same concepts to pass management itself. There are dozens of pmodifiers (pass modifiers) that create limitless possibilities in a pass.

What was the best feature of renderStacks for you?

The stability can’t be beat. I was so used to feeling a vague anxiety when working with other pass managers in production. I had been burned so many times. That vague anxiety has washed away with renderStacks. Everything works, nothing crashes, and I get to go home on time and play trains with the kids.

I also can’t leave out the ObjParams pmodifier. I have full control over any value on any modifier on any object. To be able to modify anything in my modifier stack on a per-pass basis is absolutely killer and opens up so many possibilities that previously didn’t exist.

Do you have any example of a project which renderStacks really helped?

I had a project that had over 50 different shots in one scene being managed by renderStacks. Near the end of the project, the client suddenly wanted to have a twin copy for each shot that contained an alternate version of the product we were animating. I wasn’t using any xrefs and I didn’t want to branch off a separate alternate scene, creating an evil twin that would need to be constantly updated alongside the original. I was panicking on what to do for about two minutes, until I realized all I needed to do was instance-copy the 50 passes within renderStacks, group them, and create a new instanced visibility pmodifier for the new passes with the product visibility change. Everything else took care of itself, including pathing. The total render pass management time for that debacle was under 5 minutes with renderStacks. If I would have been using State Sets, I probably would have had to spend at least a day preparing all the new passes, if it was indeed at all possible for State Sets to support 100 passes in one scene.

What do you want to say to the future renderStacks user?

There are very few tools out there that will create a paradigm shift in how you approach your work as a lighter, and renderStacks is one of them. Classically, lighting is fun, but rendering is a nightmare. renderStacks takes the pain away from pass management and makes you feel like some kind of rendering demigod. It’s far and away the best pass manager I’ve ever used, and judging by the overwhelmingly positive responses I’ve seen from others in the VFX world, it’s likely the best pass manager available on the market. It’s also incredibly affordable. And if you have any head-scratching moments with it, Quasikrystal offers the best rapid support. renderStacks will make you a faster, more effective lighter. It has plenty of tools to help with scene management in general. Try it: you most definitely won’t regret it.