Work in Progress - Behind the Scenes (Patreon)

The next scene of our story takes us on a date with Davy and Karl. They are sitting outdoors on the patio of a New York Bistro.

For the establishing shot of this scene (pictured above), I wanted to showcase the whole of the intimate dining area to the reader, which would require lots of 3D models.

My computer is maxed out with several graphics cards and a ton of RAM, but even with this setup, rendering 14 characters, Scenes, and emissive signage requires a lot of geometry and ray tracing.

So as not to completely freeze up my computer and so that it would not take hours upon hours to render, I decided to do this shot in render passes.

The first pass was just with the main characters and the waiter. Their geometry was kept at its normal setting (a bit higher definition than the extras)

The second pass was a flip of this image with all the other dinners sitting at their respective tables. Their geometry was turned down to a base level since the details didn't really need to show through.

The final render in this scene was the background. This was a clean plate shot of the patio sans any characters or tables. In post, I placed the scenes together in Photoshop and masked off the areas of overlap where people needed to be hidden behind trees or railings, etc. As a final touch, I added a very light flare coming from the Smith's BISTRO signage to create some atmosphere.

Altogether, this scene could have taken ALL day to render, whereas dividing it up into passes, I was able to accomplish the desired look in around 3 hours. Still, this is an undertaking, but it is much more reasonable of a timetable, leaving me more time in my work day to proceed to the other shots in this scene.