Multipass output handling for Cinema 4D scenes

Pixel Plow generally handles multipass output from C4D scene files in a fully automated fashion. This includes multipass output from C4D itself as well as Arnold AOV’s. To make sure you receive your desired multipass output, simply enable saving the multipass output files in your render settings. For Arnold AOV output, make sure you’ve defined an output filename and format. The farm should render both types of additional output based on what you’ve defined in your scene file, and our system should collect and deliver that output along with the primary output pass.

The only exception to this handling is that the farm will not deliver multipass output from C4D if your defined output format is .psd. The reason for this is that there are a large number of post effects in C4D that secretly enable multipass output saving, without always displaying that in the “Save” section of the render settings. Since our system has to programmatically query C4D to see if multipass saving is enabled or not, this led to many false positives. Since the default multipass output format is .psd, we decided it would be far easier to only enable multipass output saving if the file format was not .psd. This eliminates the majority of the problems where people received undesirable .psd output files when they didn’t realize multipass output saving was enabled. Again, if you want multipass output from C4D, simply choose a file format other than .psd.

Project compositing files can not be created by the farm due to the fact that they are not tagged with unique filenames when created. Since those file names are not unique, multiple render nodes can not simultaneously write to them. Previously, when compositing file saving was enabled, this would lead to write errors and job cancellation. We now automatically disable saving of compositing files for every scene file that is submitted to the farm, whether your submitted scene file had it enabled or not. There is no known work-around available to address this, as it is a fundamental limitation of multiple machines writing to one file simultaneously.