Any good way of auto creating mattes for all geometry?

[tricky]

We use the vray wire element to get quick-n-dirty mattes in all of our scenes. For critical mattes, we use Multimatte and use the material IDs. This can soon get messy and we start to run out of numbers.

Anyone know of a utility that will, for example, override the material of the scene to something quick to render (black), switch off any complicated lighting and GI, and auto render out a whole load of accurate mattes for the entire scene, or for all the selected objects?

[Donald2B]

Look at the new CryptoMatte feature of 3.6?

[tricky]

Mmm - I will. Doesn't that require Nuke or something like that?

[theedge]

Mmm - I will. Doesn't that require Nuke or something like that?

Yes it does. Either Nuke or Fusion AFAIK

[dans]

(I guess you are aware that you can use more then 16 Material IDs when you use V-ray materials by setting the ID within the material options. )

You could use psd-manager, to easily get a lot of mattes for objects and material IDs - hundreds, thousands if needed. You for example just enter "1 - 200" in the Material-Ids entry field and it will spit you out a matte as a PSD layer for every Material-IDs you actually have used and is visible in your scene. You could turn off lighting, GI etc. and use fixed sampling if you just want to render out high quality mattes. There is very little memory needed compared to using many MultiMattes elements since it uses the G-Buffer - very similar to CryptoMatte in that regard. I'm currently working on using CryptoMatte as an alternative data source for psd-manager among other things.

Daniel

[dlparisi]

Rendermask seems to work pretty well (http://www.scriptspot.com/3ds-max/scripts/rendermask). Just be sure to use it on a scene that won't get saved as I have had it mess up the scene for normal renders (but only very rarely).

[dlparisi]

I also made script that automates creating MultMatteElements elements.... use with caution as I haven't fully tested it. It will work with g-buffer ID or material ID (only up to 15 however) and can group selections or instances.

dPict Tools-MultiMatteElement_Generator.zip

P.S. thanks to Neil Blevins for the instance selecting code contained in the script...