Doing automated material assignment and renders
We got a few 1000 scanned PBR fabric materials that come as substance (.sbsar) files for use across multiple software. These work fine and look great when used in Clo. Now we'd like to automate doing test renders from Clo using these materials on a default QA scene for checking and approval. I turned the API inside out but can't find a way to do this properly. (Not even in the large amount of undocumented features as far as I can tell)
I'd even tried to unpack the zprj file and zpac files and swap out assets and updating the xml/json file before packing it all back into a zprj file again. This somewhat works but the material's meta data, like physical scale that comes from the sbsar, doesn't update and some internal cached .dds textures aren't helping either. When manually importing the sbsar files this all works fine. A few other options like externalyl modifying zfab files etc are sort of a dead end as well.
So are there any options of making this work that I've missed? Rendering itself is not an issue, simply swapping the materials is the showstopper for now. So in short:
- Load a template scene
- Swap out material (based of sbsar files)
- Render
- Repeat from step 2
(edit: I'm a technical pipeline developer, and not really a Clo end-user, so atm I'm more familiar with APIs then the actual UI or how to use Clo in general )
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For production rendering (variation) I don't use CLO3D for that type of work as it is sequential and if you are doing a lot of images for online web assets (eg: colorway options) your bottle neck will be the ability to render out in parallel all the assets. And as CLO3D can only do this sequentially it will remain a productivity restriction - so that could be a really poor strategy longer term. To get catalog visuals outputted via parallel processing I work with many render engines at the same time and push assets into a dedicated render pipeline with materials > that is substantially faster and more robust as the system is geared to that level of automation. eg: 10,000 images in a day is a pipeline scale issue whereby you can scale at a moments notice across many render appliances. eg: 100 images in ten minutes is then just a compute power dial up, as opposed to a restricted que on one device. Sequentially doing that render work from one render license is most certainly unproductive.
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Thanks for your reply. You're right and we actually do have a Deadline based renderfarm for consumer facing visuals that are made using other software. (I usually do pipeline work for large VFX projects and I've setup many renderfarms, both on premise and in the cloud. I'm now slowly finding out fashion software is not really created with these kind of large scales automation in mind :) )
Anyways, Clo is mainly used internally here and we got the request to make Q&A renders to verify the scanned materials using all the different software packages it's going to be using in all across the company. Max/V-Ray, Blender, Keyshot, etc all are easy to automate and render. Clo being the odd one out here that is hitting a wall just for the material automation part alone.
And like I said these are just internal Q&A renders for signing off the material scans and the few thousand materials we have are a backlog, normally this would be a few 100 new ones in a batch every now nd then so it's fine to render in sequence using Clo.. should only take a few days.
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Try using the cloud (Clo-set) for colorway renders from a scene. You can push those colorway swatches out as garment outputs using their online system to also process digital vray renders. >>See Clo-set cloud rendering with vray
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@Ottoline just to clarify, we don't use adobe's fabric materials we work with an advanced material scanning service the provides a ton of different textures and physical data from material samples that we provide them. From these we automatically create various material libs, anything from raw PBR texture sets to automatically generated custom sbsar files, that can easily by used by different departments for different purposes.. anyone from designers to product visualizers etc. But that's all besides the point and trust me, we do really know our stuff :)
I just need some help/advise on doing a automation task in Clo which I don't think is possible but maybe someone knows a neat trick for it..
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