Splitting EXR drives me nuts

I'm just about to learn Fusion, especially due to a certain competitor's price scheme.. Can't beat free (or nearly free).

But what I like in the 'other package' is the way you split multi layer EXR files. It's rather straight forward. Create a "shuffle node" and select the pass you'd want to use.

In Fusion it's very tedious to setup just one source into different passes. In my example, I have 8 passes. For each and every pass I have to manually select the R G B A channels. T E D I O U S when you have a lot of sources with about the same amount of passes.


I hope there's something I've missed.. Such as make all the RGBA channels automatically select the appropriate pass if I switch it to something else.

Does this exist? If not - I hope the devs can look into this. I'd like to start comping sooner than later.

If you have a lot of repetitive stuff to setup, I suggest looking into creating macros and/or presets for it.

Or write a script, if you're into that at all.

Personally - and I apologize if this is not helpful to you - I'm not a fan of putting lots of layers/passes in single files. Means you either have to rerender everything to change one pass, or things get messy. That's not to say there's no room for improvement in dealing with them in Fusion...

Don't let that be a show stopper for you, I've seen many artist discover the advantages of not having all the passes in a single file. Both have their advantages of course, but play around and you'll start to see what I mean.

As Pieter said, I've seen facilities write scripts that builds a beauty pass by matching all the passes on disk. The beauty of that (no pun intended) is being able to see the passes so you can easily make use of them as mattes/masks within the flow.

I also suggest having separate EXRs for your passes. It'll be faster to load and render (at least unless you're using EXR 2.0 which Fusion doesn't support yet).

However...
on the other hand, I have never received a re-rendering of a single pass because it had a bug in it. The whole thing or frame was re-rendered. (I think some renderers like VRay will even render the beauty first and then split out passes afterwards).

Fusion could really need some big improvements when it comes to multi-channel renderings. Even if you split the passes into several files... the way to handle/update/copy a setup of several loaders is still very tedious and error-prone. You can't instance loaders for example. You can't have expressions in a loader's file input to automatically insert version numbers or pass names from somewhere else so you can't really build a macro out of your multi-loader setup. In Nuke it's pretty easy to build a gizmo that exposes just a couple of parameters (shot number, element name and version number for example) and builds the file names for all your exrs behind the scenes.

If you write scripts to update and manage a multi-pass setup there are also many pitfalls, especially if you want to replace a loader's file sequence with one that has a different frame range.

I once had to duplicate a multi-loader setup because half of it was re-rendered to fix a bug. With more than a dozen passes this is hell (adding all the Dissolve nodes to switch each Loader to the other halfway through the shot). Clip lists sound like a nice feature to solve this... but they are notoriously hard to handle or automate.

hi,
we all know what You are talking about, and that is the downside of Fusion.
However, however Hardcore Fusion Users wrote some scripts / tool scripts, which can help You to navigate through channels etc.
I hope They (or BMD Moderator) don't mind me sharing them, since they were free and published on other Fu forum. i even linked a keyboard shortcut to some of the scripts, to automate

hmmm the forum givs me a warning that the quota has been reached, but the zip archive is 30KB...
will find a new place

EDIT:
ok, here's the dropbox link
Scripts were working in fu 6.4 . just copy the scripts folder to Fusion install dir.
Some are Comps scripts (Menu>Scripts), some are tool scripts (RMB on loader>scripts>)
A big Thank You to the developers of those scripts, as usual

cheers!

Thank you! it works on Fu 7.5

Thanks for the ton of feedback! I had a hard time accessing the internet, and had to keep going with this project.. I'll check the mentioned script!

At least I got done on time. It's a rendering assignment at school.

I'm on tablet now, so I can't check zip files from Dropbox link. The only thing I'm using for EXRs are hos_splitexr script: svenneve.com/?p=239

I can recommend the hos_SplitEXR script form svenneve too. It works fine!

Cheers

Peter

Anyone have something like this for the latest version of fusion ?

Following this thread :
viewtopic.php?f=22&t=52326

Thanks for the ton of feedback! I had a hard time accessing the internet, and had to keep going with this project.. I'll check the mentioned script!

At least I got done on time. It's a rendering assignment at school.

Hi,

this is a really beautiful reel. I like it!

How did you render those nice wireframe takes out of maya ?
They are looking really good!

Peter

I have an EXR sequence that contains multi layered files. Currently, I can load them fine but can only see the main RGB pass. So, I picked up the hos_SplitEXR script and while it does split the EXRs out, every time I try to view them, the tool turns red and I get this error in console:

Code: Select all

OpenEXR: Error reading pixel data from image file "/Volumes/...File.exr". No frame buffer specified as pixel data destination.
UV failed to load file "/Volumes/...File.exr" (clip "/Volumes/...File.exr" at frame 0) : Invalid argument
UV failed at time 0

"UV" is the name of one of the passes I'm trying to break out.

Same error happens on other EXR files, too. They split fine in After Effects using EXtractoR. Is there some way to get them working in Fusion? Let me know if I'm missing something..

**EDIT: I got the UV pass to show by manually going into the loader for "UV" (loaded by the script) and changing the RGB channels to pipe in UV.red, UV.green, UV.blue). Now it shows up but I hope the script was supposed to do that automatically. Will get tiresome to plug that all in manually.

Hi Andy,

I have this issue with EXR files rendered out of Cinema4D. The EXR channels from C4d come with a numbering system, which looks like the script doesn't account for. When I use multi-channel EXRs rendered from Modo, there is no numbering system in the channels and the script works as expected.

For example, Modo's EXR channels are named:
Reflection indirect.R
Reflection indirect.G
Reflection indirect.B

C4D's EXR channels are named:
#0002#Reflection indirect.R
#0002#Reflection indirect.G
#0002#Reflection indirect.B

Ah, thanks for the info. These are coming from Cinema4D, too. That seems to be the problem.

What I've been doing is manually splitting out the multi-channels from C4d (if you use the same type of rendering a lot) and create a macro from the manual work. Then when you want to use the same set up with a new render, or project with the same channels being rendered, use the tool script "Tim Little_Update Loaders"

As long as you template what channels your rendering, this works quite well.
For example:

I create a render template in c4d as"
"1_multiChannel_RGBpasses" This has, beauty, diffuse, reflection, and AO
"2_multiChannel_TechPasses" This has, Normal, WPP, ObjectID, Motion vectors

In Fusion I create macros:
1_multiChannel_RGBpasses
2_multiChannel_TechPasses

So every time I render with the template from c4d I just correspond the correct macro and run Tim's script.

This is just a simple example, I have it broken out into much more detail than this, but hopefully it will get you started and save you a bunch of manual work in the future.