CGCookie community,
I've been working on a 4 minute animation. It's broken into over 16 "shot" files. Each of these files has a link to the building and environment collection that the animations takes place in.
This includes the building itself, the exterior, all the lights in the building, the sun, irradiance volumes, etc.
I've had little luck getting the lighting to work right. The lighting is baked in the original environment file, but that doesn't carry over to the shot files. Baking lighting in the shot files doesn't seem to help either.
Shawn(Sean?) suggested I link in the scene itself, which seemed to help. I got the lighting information. Unfortunately I wasn't really able to use the linked scene. It can't be overridden, so I cannot add any models or animations to it.
I'm probably missing something simple here. I'm almost down to simply appending the scene into every shot, but I'm wondering if somebody else has a suggestion that may work better.
Edit: I guess the reverse could work. Create a copy of the scene with the baked lighting - I really don't want to mess up the original scene file. Have a "Shot 1", "Shot 2" collection in each of the shot files that contain all the objects, animations, etc. Link those collections into the scene file and turn them on or off as needed.
Edit 2: I'll need to make sure that the scene linked into the shot files - for positional data - isn't copied back into the "master scene" file.
Perhaps you can do it the other way around? The file where you have the lighting and all, have that be the main file where all the animations take place in different scenes? So the main stage lives there and the thing coming in are the rigs and characters and then have 16 scenes in that file always using the same environment?
Omar,
I think that's what I'm going to have to do. If there's a "better" way to do it, I'm all ears, but that's likely what I will need to do.
Edit: Thank you for your answer!
I said this in Discord, but I'll mention it here too.
Omar's suggestion worked. I'm getting both the lighting information and the object/animation information by linking in the animation collections into the scene file.
The main downside to this, and it's not Blender's fault, but my own for not setting things up properly in the first place, is that I have to redo all my camera markers, and I'll have to adjust the start times of all the animations.
That's much better than having to append the scene file, and re-bake lighting, 16 different times for each of the shot files.
dillenbata3 - I'll have to give that a try.
Edit: It'd be nice to keep the scenes smaller, rather than loading everything up into one big scene.
Edit 2: I also have a Blender Studio subscription. They may have tutorials on managing a larger project. Even if they don't, they certainly have the source files. I should see how they have things laid out for their movies.
Edit 3: Or check out the monster truck animation to see what was done there, assuming it has lots of shots in different files.
The linking doesn't surprise me. You almost have to on bigger projects.
I'll want to see if they use one big "scene file" to link in all the animations so the baked in lighting works, if they use your approach of having the scene be a background, or if they're doing something else that I missed that allows the scene to be linked into individual shot files while keeping the lighting data.
I just did some asking around. It turns out that baking indirect lighting in eevee isn't designed for animation. This is one of the limitations of eevee. Just like only 128 lights and only 8 shadow sun lights. I'm going to have to look up shadow sun lights. I think that means sun lights that cast shadows. I also found out that HDRs are treated as indirect light and that's why they don't cast shadows in eevee. One of the girls thinks this is suppose to be changed in eevee next.