To start lightly. My rule of thumb for every single shot output is that it must reference it’s originating scene in the name and add any modifier after that. So if maya scene is prj_sh010_light_v01.ma, renders produced by it will always be prj_sh010_light_v01_layer1.exr, prj_sh010_light_v01_layer2.exr .
If we need to rerender only layer2, then maya scene gets iterated and it’ll become prj_sh010_light_v02_layer2.exr prj_sh010_light_v02_layer2.exr
to be completely honest I’ve never rendered multiple cameras from the same scene, and we always do multichannel exr, so mostly we just have one modifier in the filename, which is layer, but otherwise I’d go with your last option. prj_sh010_light_v01_cam1_layer1_channel1.exr. It is long, but it also makes it much easier to take out of context. For example when giving to external freelancer to do a shot at home.
The thinking here is, that even though layer1 could be generated from scene v02, it’s real origin is scene v01, so I want that tracked in case we need to recreate it precisely some day.
This is where we currently take a very simple approach as described in another thread. We publish when submitting render to the farm, which also creates entry in the database with version which is empty to start with and has status of on farm. Once frames get rendered, this status changes to render complete notifying the artist that he needs to check it. When he does, which is a process I’d like to keep on human side (to be able to check for visual problems in frames too), he changes the status of version to approved which triggers start of compositing task and completes lighting task. Keep in mind that he’s not publishing frames, because they’ve already been ‘pre-published’ for him.
That’s what we do technically. However there is another aspect to this which is CG light approvals. This is area where I see tons of possible improvements. The problem we have is, that our CG render are practically never reviewable raw. So the process is that lighter render one frame of each layer (usually locally), does a quick slapcomp and submits this image for review, together with the nuke script (whic can be picked up by compositor as a start point), and a light rig that can be reused in other shots. That way supervisor has better idea of what’s going on there.
If this get’s approved, lighting task changes status to to render so artist knows he can send full range to the farm. This is usually done once per sequence (a collection of shots in the same environment and lighting condition) and then all the shots in the sequence can be sent to farm.
It’s a lot of back and forth, but it does save on rendering time quite a bit.
This is something I’m thinking about for very long time. The problem we usually run into is that standardizing renders enough to be able to produce these slapcomps automatically tends to be…tricky, to say the least. But with a bit of determination it should be possible and would be great.
Not saying either is better, just throwing it out there.