Rendering & Post Production

Scene Assembly

The entire layout was built in Houdini Solaris using USD. Some objects are imported from the OBJ or SOP context into Solaris. Others are imported as one mesh and instanced to points.

Polyreduced Backfaces

Arch front faces

To keep things light and fast in rendering, the number of backface polygons was reduced, and textures were downscaled, relative to the position of the camera. These steps cut the cache size by more than half. The final scene was cached in USD format for smooth transfer to the remote render farm.

Rendering

Beauty passes were rendered in the cloud using Karma XPU through GridMarkets render farm.

To avoid opening the full Houdini interface, the Husk command-line tool was used to render directly from USD files.

Avoiding running Houdini helps test the project for consistency between local machine and farm, and reduces software runtime costs.

Gridmarkets Submit

Gridmarkets Preflight

Direct Emission Karma XPU

Direct Emission Karma CPU

Indirect Emission

Cryptomatte Objects

Cryptomatte Materials

Ambient Occlusion

Albedo Enhance Layer

Albedo

Explosion and fire effects were rendered locally using Karma CPU on an in-house server.

Karma’s adaptive sampling helped speed things up by focusing more render time on complex areas while letting simple regions render faster. In some cases, frames finished rendering faster than they could be loaded into memory.

ACEScg is used as working/rendering color space.

Compositing

Fusion Compositing

No roof textures

Roof Compositing Texturing

Roof Mask

Roof UV Map

Roof Tiles Textures

All render passes were composited in the Fusion tab of DaVinci Resolve.

Rooftop textures were added at the compositing as a fix with a UV pass used to apply it to avoid a full re-render.

The original renders had a bright sky with a dark foreground, which looked realistic but flat. In post, the sky was darkened to create a heavier mood, and extra lighting was added around the arch to bring focus and depth to it.

Sky before compositing

Sky after compositing

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