Project Setup/Management and Quality Assurance for Small Business
by Anselm v. Seherr - Thoß, Germany


I use to set up a basic Layer structure from the beginning on. I always divide a scene by CHARACTER and STAGE. The STAGE layer contains all Enviroment Mattes, Lights, etc.

For animators e.g. I use to add a layer HELPER where the rig is supposed to rest in. And so on… Maybe use Blur´s ONION for even better Layer management…


Now save that still empty scene as Maxstart.max and restart Max. Notice all your settings are still set. Copy that Maxstart.max to every machine into the scenes folder or direct max to search for it on a network path.

Working like a "Pro"

a) Use Scene States: Tools > Manage Scene States...


Save scene states for every render layer. We use VRay as an example. Look at the help how scene states work in detail (Keyword: Manage Scene States Dialog). That´s nothing I wanna cover here.


Notice: Scene States can´t deal with most of the 3rd party plugs. So some settings still need to be set the oldschool way.

Here are the render elements i render usually.


Annotation: The render elements „VrayRaw-Lighting“ and „RGB“ are only for quality checking. „RGB“ is the render output of the frame buffer so basicly every layer merged together. „VRayRawLighting“ renders gray geometry showing from where the light actually came from. That information could be important for post production.

That’s the ROOT of my render output folder. EVERY single output will be rendered to a subfolder in the right directory:
*Charactername*_*RenderElementName*

e.g.: Vray_Alpha >> DemoChar_VrayAlpha >> DemoChar_Vrayalpha01.EXR


In Adobe After Effetcs comp all these layers look like this:


„VRay Lighting“is the Basic layer. All other Render Elements are above using „Add“as the layer mode. MASTER is my RGB layer to check if everything worked out right.