Post-production color change

[Muhammed_Hamed]

This is what my raw passes look like (useless). It has been this way since V-Ray NEXT. I use an HDRI. This is RAW diffused.

Since Vray Next, you gonna need GI, Reflection and Refraction elements, you will need to have these elements added(even if you will not use them) ... for their Raw passes to render correctly

[fixeighted]

Unfortunately this won't work if you use adaptive lights, as they produce artifacts in the GI pass.

Shame about the adaptive light thing; I for one have no idea when it will or won't work, until I notice it is broken - a bit 'suck it and see', which I don't like.
An example would be that my image renders in lighting speed with adaptive, then I have to do what Bobby is trying to do here and it breaks, meaning I have to revert and lose the speed increase.
I'm of the opinion it should still have the WIP attached to it.
Unless I am missing something of course, in which case I'd retract that, gladly

[glorybound]

Yeah, the adaptive lighting in NEXT seemed to have been half baked.

[fixeighted]

Well it's a bit weird really. It says that RawGI and Diffuse = GI
But in this test I did the normal GI pass (presumably the internally merged raw of Diff and GI) is fine and the diffuse is fine but the rawGI is showing the adaptive box artifacts.
Surely if they are essentially parts of the whole then they should split up properly.
I don't understand.

[Muhammed_Hamed]

I have used this plenty of times to do exactly what Bobby is doing here, without running into the bucket issues (mostly was product renders)
I thought Vlado fixed all the buckets issues at some point during Vray Next cycle..and rightfully so, I haven't seen them in a long while
will try with an interior scene tonight, and let you guys know how this goes

[fixeighted]

Literally just tried it again now with the elements as discussed - just to check...blockiness in the raw gi pass but not in any others, including the regular gi pass, as attached.
They are also present when using wrappers for shadows, so def not gone.

[glorybound]

I get the boxes often, so often I have to disable adaptive.

[radoslav.platikanov]

Literally just tried it again now with the elements as discussed - just to check...blockiness in the raw gi pass but not in any others, including the regular gi pass, as attached.
They are also present when using wrappers for shadows, so def not gone.

Seems like either the GI or the diffuse filter element is missing. It should work as it says in the documentation and there shouldn't be any block artifacts if the required elements are added.
Also note that you need the VRayDiffuseFilter element, not VRayRawDiffuseFilter (which was mentioned in the thread).

[fixeighted]

All I did was test what NeilG proposed on the first page of this post. He used the raw diffuse, although I tried with both raw and the standard diffuse. The result is the same as you can see attached.

[fixeighted]

Hmm...well after composing these passes those blocks disappear. This is confusing.
Are we to assume that if a pass looks wrong then we should just ignore that, as it is in fact correct?
That is very counterintuitive.

[radoslav.platikanov]

All I did was test what NeilG proposed on the first page of this post. He used the raw diffuse, although I tried with both raw and the standard diffuse. The result is the same as you can see attached.

It's not enough for this to work, the regular GI and Lighting elements are missing.
Here's a setup that should work for raw GI and Lighting:




These are the formulas for deriving the raw elements:

VRayRawGlobalIllumination = VRayGlobalIllumination / VRayDiffuseFilter
VRayRawLighting = VRayLighting / VRayDiffuseFilter
VRayRawReflection = VRayReflection / VRayReflectionFilter
VRayRawRefraction = VRayRefraction / VRayRefractionFilter

Hmm...well after composing these passes those blocks disappear. This is confusing.

It's actually expected, otherwise you'd probably have artifacts in the RGB too. But it doesn't mean they should be ignored.
The block artifacts can be avoided easily by adding all the needed elements, or even deriving the elements manually in post using the above formulas.

[Neilg]

I have no idea what is going so wrong for everyone else. It works perfectly for me exactly as i'd described.

[fixeighted]

Thanks for that explanation.
I naturally thought that an element of a render is exactly that, one part of the calculation that is able to be separated out.
I didn't realise that in order to get that specific element that we needed literally to generate all the other elements which compose that element.

[fixeighted]

Can you post a grab of exactly what elements you add?

I do have this working but I remain curious about it.
Basically, using the passes I attached above, based on your post, I get artifacts in the passes, which when composited all go away....so that's good. And it recreates the beauty and I can change stuff, as was the intention.
However, the fact that there were artifacts (I assume you got these too, using an adaptive dome) bugged me.
Radolslav says that they are there because I did not add the other passes, the regular GI and lighting.
So, when I do add these passes the RawGI pass comes out differently...coloured as the regular one - and there are no artifacts.
But if there is no difference in the end result then it seems the only reason to add those other passes is to make the artifacts go away.

[Neilg]

The elements in my photoshop file are exactly as they are named in vray. I haven't composed those out of anything - in addition to what you see I also have a ton of multimattes, zdepth, alpha etc but they dont affect anything.
I didn't get artifacts.