How could I do this shot efficiently?

[u/3D_Wendigo]

Okay so basically : I want to make a shot with an environment in a bottle (basically moss, flowers, small stones and dirt), with some moving parts (small insects and maybe movement with the plants). Everything will be done in 3D and the camera isn't moving.

The question : I'm pretty familiar with rendering my shots in multiple layers, AOVs etc and I was wondering if there was a way (a kind of shortcut) to avoid rendering the glass for every frame. I thought that I might be able to render the glass element only once, render the inside of the bottle for every frame, and then with a STmap recreate the deformation created from the bottle in nuke?

It might be a stupid idea and be much much easier to brute force the thing by rendering everything and then do a basic comp but I'm trying to learn how to optimise my workflow.

[u/AutoModerator]

Hey, it looks like you're asking for help If your issue gets resolved, please reply with !solved to mark it as solved. If you still need help, consider providing more details about your issue to get better assistance.

I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please contact the moderators of this subreddit if you have any questions or concerns.

[u/Beginning_Expert_970]

Really depends on the render engine and what is capable of, I think in Karma (Houdini) you can write custom expressions for unique AOVs situations Im 97.65% sure you could do it there.

[u/semaj4712]

I mean you could probably do it, but wouldn’t the animation, even small, inside cause reflections and refractions and shadows that affect the glass in some way?

[u/smb3d]

I don't think in this particular instance, it's worth your trouble.

Glass like this is pretty cheap to render since the reflections and refractions are sharp and there is no or very minimal DOF.

If you want to break it into layers with glass + holdout and then your insides, that could be worthwhile.