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I'm working on an animated scene that I would describe as complicated.

Town Scene

The scene is large so to decrease the memory load, I have each part of the scene split into a separate .blend file. Each building (there are 14) get their own .blend file. Each of which is around or greater than 40mb

enter image description here

Then I have separate file for the road and a file for the figures. I'm basically trying to follow how to render a complex scene but with each layer in its own file.

The problem is, and this can be seen in the image I posted above, my layers are not front to back, because sometimes my figures are behind a building.

enter image description here

I was thinking maybe I could somehow use the offending building as a mask over my figures in a separate composite. Something like this:

enter image description here

But then any figures in the foreground get cut off.

Is there a solution to this problem? Right now my idea is to render every single figure on its own layer. But I have 35 and that sounds like a pain.

What are the best practices for compositing a complicated animated scene taking into account changing foreground and background objects?

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  • $\begingroup$ Looking at your image, there seem to be other issues as well. For example, the building are not casting shadows onto many of the mini-figures, and sometimes shadows are being double counted (when the mini-figures are in shadow themselves). The best solution, considering you are working with lego-animation, would probably be instancing. Most objects that appear in your scene appear multiple times, so instancing them could save an insane amount of memory. I'm willing to bet you could get at least a 5-10x reduction. $\endgroup$ – GiantCowFilms Apr 9 '18 at 2:02

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