Rendering and Compositing - Animating with Blender: How to Create Short Animations from Start to Finish - page 300

Let's look at another composite that involves the use
of more than one scene. Shot 07 in The Beast includes
the Beast, the mother, and both dogs. While the scene
was renderable on some equipment, other computers
(particularly Windows boxes) would crash from time
to time due to the high number of strands present. To
work around the problem, a duplicate Scene was cre-
ated inside the Shot 07 BLEND fi le. To create the new
Scene, ADD NEW was chosen from the Scene drop-
down menu on the main header, and Link ObData was
chosen as the duplication option. This dialog is shown in
Figure 15.38. The Scene layer buttons were adjusted on Figure 15.37 A good composite

Figure 15.39 The Render Layer settings for the dogs

Figure 15.38 Adding a new Scene with Link ObData

in the new scene

this new scene to exclude the Beast and the
mother, and the Render Layer changed to
provide an Alpha mask for the set (Figure
15.39). This new scene will be identical in
every way to the original with the excep-
tion of these layer and render settings.

Back in the main Scene, the layer with the
dogs is disabled in the scene buttons so they
are not even considered. Figure 15.40 shows
the compositor, with the dogs brought in
by selecting their named Scene and Render
Layer in an Input node. One of the great-
est strengths of the compositor is the ability
to bring in elements from not only different Figure 15.40 Bringing the dog Scene into the composite of the original Scene