Rendering Passes in Phoenix 3ds Max

[stelees]

Hey there,

In a lot of the VFX breakdowns you see the various passes of water sims that then allows tuning of each layer. I thought it would be in the render settings but how do I render out the liquid, foam, splashes, mist each as their own exr or tga to then be able to have them in layers so I can tweak the colours and the like.

I looked on the Chaos website but couldnt see anything about Phoenix render passes.

I found a tutorial from a couple of years ago but the settings are now different it seems.

Thanks.

[stelees]

Here is the sort of thing I am hoping to achieve in relation to passes, not sure if this is achievable with Phoenix.

[Svetlin.Nikolov]

Hey, sure, you can achieve this using V-Ray's render elements. Here is a table with all elements showing what Phoenix version and what Phoenix render mode supports them: https://docs.chaosgroup.com/display/...ements+Support

Currently you can get different passes for different particle systems by making the different particle shaders renderable/non-renderable though...

[stelees]

Thanks, I found that one but couldn't see what to use in order to pull out just the 4 main parts, liquid, foam, splashes and mist. I saw vrayAtmosphere but that only give fire and smoke? I know I am missing something really obvious here, but not sure what.

[Svetlin.Nikolov]

Hey, the Particle Shader renders as an atmosphere too unless you enable Render as Geometry, try it

[stelees]

ok still confused with this. Should I add a render element of vrayAtmosphere to the render settings. When I render will that add a mist, foam and splash channel to the output along with rgb? Is there no tutorial somewhere on how to do this step by step that covers the current version of Phoenix and Vray for this?

[Svetlin.Nikolov]

Yes, that's it - no need to be confused. If you have any doubts, run a waterfall preset sim for two minutes until foam, splash and mist are generated and then render it out with the render elements so you'd see first hand the results

[stelees]

ok so I enable geo on the shaders, add the vrayAtmosphere render element and hit render. Then in the drop down box where RGB is I will be able to pull out the different layers?

[stelees]

I have enabled render as geo on the shaders. I have added a vrayAtmosphere. The foam and such seems to be more washed out now and the _atmosphere tga per the vray settings is not being created. Again, I feel like I am ticking the boxes per what is being replied but it just goes from no to no.

[Svetlin.Nikolov]

Hey,

Please double check the page with the render element support I sent you above.

The particle shaders render as an atmosphere Unless you enable "render as geometry". In that case, they render as geometry, not as an atmosphere. Thus they will Not show in the atmosphere render element.

Cheers!

[stelees]

ok so I have the three elements in the vrayatmosphere (foam, splash, mist) and can bring that out as a channel when rendering out as the exr. Is there a way to render them to the atmosphere channel and NOT in the RGB view.
So ideally I would like just the rocks, liquid as a channel and the atmosphere as a channel. But even if I just had everything else in RGB and the foam, splash and mist separate that would work. I was looking in the render settings in phoenix and didn't see anything like that.

[Svetlin.Nikolov]

Oh no, sorry, you can't do it right now.

It is becoming obvious that we need to have such render elements though, logging it in our tracker..

[stelees]

ok thanks, I will just roll with one frame per everything as a rendered sequence and tweak what I can in PS. Cheers

[Joelaff]

Definitely support for multi matte or similar without resorting to “render as geometry” would be a BIG plus for us.

[stelees]

Joelaff I just don't understand the 'render as geometry' workflow to come up with some sort of render pass process, what do you do in relation to that?