So to pick back up where we left off, basically, I accidentally made an over off offset mash node
in between the lessons and it offset the grass way down.
So I just deleted that offset note and it was back where it should be.
So in this lesson, I want to cover the render setup in Maya or what used to be called render layers.
And if you're familiar with render layers, you can get to the old system by going to the preferences
and rendering and say preferred render setup and say legacy render layers.
You will have to restart Maya, but you can get to the old system that way.
But we're going to use the new way called render setup and set a little it's a little convoluted.
It could hopefully they fix it and later versions.
But basically it's up here.
There's a little button and now we have a render setup.
And essentially what we need to do is select everything that we want and add it to this collection or
this render layer.
So in this example, what we're going to do is try to separate the Firefly's from everything else.
So that means that when a firefly goes behind the tree, it should disappear.
But we don't want to see the tree.
All right.
So when we're compositing, we can just bring in the Firefly's on their own so that we can have finer
control over how we kind of composite the fireflies.
If we want to add Glos and whatever we can, we can isolate the fireflies and only glow those and not
the rest of the scene.
So what we need to do is go in here and grab every piece of geometry that's in the scene that we want
to include and then middle mouse drag it into a collection.
So let's go through here and select everything from the outliner that we want to include, which is
basically all of that.
And then we can right click here and say create new collection or create collection.
And we'll just call this scene and then we can middle mouse drag from the outliner into it.
Says Agit collection include a middle mouse track that in now, if we had named everything with a suffix
or prefix, we could have
we could have just type that in here as an expression and it would include everything with that suffix
or prefix.
But we didn't.
So we just need a middle mouse, drag it in here.
So what we need to do next is to add a shader override and in that shader override we can add the holdout.
Now, hold out just basically means and we're going to use a surface shader for that hold up basically
means that you can't see it and there's an alpha there.
So it's totally transparent.
So we need to turn out that opacity all the way to black.
And for us to test this in the render, we basically need to turn off rendering the whole scene, which
is this little tab here.
So when you turn that off and we have this one on, so we go to Arnold, render prevue, it should render
that layer basically by itself.
And what we should see is a totally black.
We shouldn't actually see anything because the holdout, you know, should be completely transparent.
So that is not what we see.
We turn that off, so let's turn off the visibility of this, let's turn on the visibility of that and
now it should work.
So let's go to Arnold.
Let's go and let's make sure that we have all the shards here are there.
So now when we go to Arnold Reinterview, we just needed to have that.
I turned on.
So now it should be totally black and it should take two seconds to render, which it does.
And we test the alpha.
We can see it's totally blank.
Cool.
So we have the holdouts.
That's a huge step.
So now we need to do is add the Firefly's someone to turn back on the visibility of the whole scene.
So the whole scene should pop back on and now we can just select the Firefly's.
Or we could just find them in the outliner, select one of the Firefly's, so that should bring up the
Olympic cache, mean hit F in the outliner to find it.
And then now I'm going to make a new collection here.
So I'm going to say create collection.
I'm going to call this Firefly's.
Cool.
So now all I need to do is just include that in here and that's it, we just need to view this.
And now what we should get is all of the fireflies, and they should all be kind of correctly occluded
by anything that's in front of them.
That makes sense.
OK, so let's test that.
So what we should get is a totally transparent background and analysis.
So we check the Alpha should look pretty much the exact same, which it does.
So it's pretty amazing.
We have created this interview here and let me just check it in the render cam.
So all we need to do is to add the render cam by middle mouse it like we did the Olympic cache, and
then we can go back into the Arnold Render preview and you may need to hit refresh for it to update
for us to be able to select the render cam so we can switch between these two now and we can render
this with the holdout and everything looks correct.
Right.
If we look at this compared to this view, we can see that we shouldn't have any Firefly's in this kind
of quadrant.
Right, because this tree is blocking them and we can see here that's the case.
So it looks like everything's working properly and now we can render this as just the Firefly's.
So let's go over to the rendering tab here and let's go to first.
Let's make sure the render setup, the settings are correct.
So it doesn't really matter.
These don't really matter because the fireflies are surface raiders anyways.
But we might want to turn on motion blur.
So let's just enable that and let's go and call this Firefly's and.
Now we can say name no extension, and we want to do the one thousand one to twelve hundred and frame,
we want to make sure we have the render cam selected and the correct kind of settings here, depending
on how you want to render this out.
I say 720 and now are ready to export.
Now, you could do x r it doesn't really matter, but we just want to make sure that we have some file
format that has transparency.
So now when we render and we go to render render sequence, it will start to render each one of these
frames.
So I'll see in a second and we will pick back up, finishing out, rendering the actual scene the rest
of the scene besides the Firefly's.
Let me just hold on here for one second, because it looks like it's rendering the perspective cam.
And even though that we told it to render the render cam, let me just minimize this real quick and
show you that says camera perspective shape.
Right.
We're correctly rendering the whole DAULAIRE But, you know, my just decides to not respect what we
said here in the render settings where we said render cam, render the render cam.
It's not doing that.
So we can delete that or close it out and go to render sequence again and hit this little option box.
So for some reason it's choosing to override what we already chose with the perspective shape.
So let's select render cam here and do that again.