"File Output," node relative export support from command line
I know this is kind of niche, but as someone who uses a render farm the command line might be one of my most used tools. The problem is, I also like to do compositing in 2 stages, where I render out the raw image sequences and then later do the compositing which makes it easier and faster to comply with client changes.
While I can do multi-layer EXR, that doesn't allow you to output multiple render layers to the same file. It would be nice if I could enter something like "#output#/comp1/fileOut_" in one file output node, and "#output#/comp2/fileOut_" in a second file output node, and then "#output#" would be whatever output directory I specify in my command line arguments.
5 Comments
Do you use Blender for your compositing?
As for the file output nodes, I'm fairly certain you could set up a Python script with a handler that goes into the node tree and modifies the property at render time (this would be a workaround). But you want to be able to specify the wildcard directory in the command line?
* @Josephbburg * I do use Blender for compositing, but rendering a sequence can take hours and is a lot of wasted time when all you want to do is tweak a simple post-processing node based on a clients request. Therefore it's much better to render out the raw sequence, and then do post-processing in a separate scene / file.
I'm aware I could probably use python to do something like this, but at the same time I think it's something that should definitely be built into Blender.
* @Zach Hixson * You can run a python script through Blender from the command line, I think by
blender.exe --python [script directory]Have you tried Natron? I haven't used it myself but it looks good and it's also FLOSS.
* @Josephbburg * Yes, I have tried Natron and use it on occasion (but the fact that Fusion is built into Resolve kind of removes the need for anything else when it comes to my purposes) but that's not the issue.
Yes I could run a python script to do whatever I want, and I do that quite frequently. Using the File Output node becomes completely useless if you are using the command line, and this is unfortunate, which is why I was proposing a way to do this natively inside Blender.
* @Zach Hixson * I totally agree that it's a good idea, just trying to offer some workarounds in the meantime :D