Forgot what its like to live without Multimatte!

[Morbid Angel]

Just wanted to share my pain. Working on a project which I am required to use mental ray in maya 2013. Unified sampling is kind of nice (same thing as DMC sampler?) but the lack of multimatte and the simplicity of render elements provided by vray is just killing me. On the small scale where I don't have 100 machines rendering my passes this is really a problem! I mean each ID has to be an actual render layer! Yes I know about the customLabel and customColor but they are limited and man... I've realized how spoiled we are with multimatte and other awesomeness vray has to offer!!!

[pechart]

I feel with you. You always realise how great things are, when they are gone

Btw, I just recently made a small script for automatically assigning MultimatteIDs to Materials or Shading Groups and creating the according Render Elements. It checks which IDs are already taken and skips them when doing the assignment, but it considers them while creating the REs. Dunno if this is a good approach, time will tell
ObjectIDs are not recognized in any stage, though. It's far from perfect (escecially on the programming side), but maybe someone will find it usefull. No warranties, of course!

Oh, and it's just for VRay...
autoCreateIDsAndMMs.zip

[Dariusz Makowski (Dadal)]

I work everyday in Mental ray - work - and man day by day I just want to slice my wrist off and kill myself... I showed yesterday a mental lover boy what Vray can do and after 30 min he was like... "umh... soo can we move to Vray now please ? ". Took me around that long to convert him to vray boy lol.

Vray > MR.

As to matte

Use DJX Multi Matte Pass. Its automatic quick and ull get all masks in 1 EXR and 1 render...

Thanks ,bye.

[joa_grilo]

Dadal that's was a great tip! Thanks using it in the Mental Ray stuff, trying to get the guy to have vray on my newest company...

[Dariusz Makowski (Dadal)]

Happy to help Hope you guys move to vray too