Layered Render Tool

This is a tool that I made for BYU’s 2021 Animated Film “Stowaway.” I wrote it as a component of the DCC Pipeline tools we used for the film, and it saved so many hours of tedious work! It works by using a couple of custom HDA’s in tandem to automate the entire process of creating render layers, and it reduced the time it took to make the layers by a couple of orders of magnitude.

All the artist has to do is put the name of the objects they want on their own layer in the parameter window (grouped objects works too!), click the “Build Render Layers” button, and Voila! Each object they specified will have its own render node that automatically matte’s and phantoms the other layers, based on the order they were specified. It makes compositing a breeze and allowed us to rapidly render the film.

I am so proud of this tool because it single-handedly made the entire process of rendering and compositing a breeze compared to what I did before, which was painstakingly make each layer in each shot by hand. *shudders*

If you want to see the HDA yourself, it’s part of the DCC Pipeline tools which you can find on Github here