CGSociety has a great article about the short film “Meet Meline” from Virginie Goyons and Sebastien Laban. In it they discuss the whole process from concept to completion, and some of the interesting revelations along the way.
When they knew from their storyboard previs that the background would be out of focus they just reduced the polygons number by 10 or even 100 “Since it will be blurred during compositing you don t have to have every detail of the objects and hires textures with features like bump specular etc ” explains Sebastien. “We also separated their render into multipasses.” The foreground was rendered alone first render then the middle ground second render and then the background third render . Instead of having to handle millions of polygons at once this old technique allows to spread the amount of work and helped the computer to complete the render.
