Rerendering again..

And so I'm re-rendering all my elements, again. The reason for this was that I had to change my animation and simulation attributes so the tentacles would not look really stiff near the head. That was caused when I unknowingly edited the gluetoanimation attribute while trying to solve another problem.
And since I had to re-render anyway, I took the opportunity to tweak my animation for the hero jellyfish.

The background jellyfish were also re-simmed, however, only 5 were simulated this time, instead of 20 in order to save ROPing time. The 5 were then duplicated, rotated and translated to populate the scene. The kelp were also scaled down as I found that they filled up too much of the screen and were taking the focus away from the jellyfish. Another problem I found was with generating a zdepth pass from semi-opaque objects where the information was inaccurate. To solve this, another mantra node was created to render the objects with matte shading and the micropolygon engine to speed things up. The zdepth passes were rendered out separately for each element to be merged in Nuke. This was done so that I could duplicate the renders of the kelp and background jellyfish to create the illusion of even more jellyfish further away without the extra render time. By keeping the zdepth passes of each element separate, I can then duplicate the required one and increase the value so the ZBlur would work on the duplicated element as well.

I also ended up using the light emission pass as the main pass for one of the hero jellyfish as there was some nice transparency going on there which was lost in the beauty pass. The other pass were then graded and added on top of it. Render times from Nuke also seem to be going up, at about 4 hours for 400 frames now.

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