Render Elements workflow?

[Mats_O]

Hi all,

I understand what most of the render elements are, but it would be interesting to hear how you use the passes, how you composite them and WHY you use them instead of rendering everything to just one image.

What is your normal Render Elements workflow?

[mike_kennedy]

Mine is fairly basic,
DOF only, load that up into After Effects and pop on a DOF (Lenscare) effect. We do motion blur in post as well.
Cheers
Mike K

[Shimakaze]

Depends on what I'm doing. for regular sized still pictures I generally render everything out normally while adding ZDepth, unclamped colors (if needed), multimatte for compositing, and whatever else I think I'll need. When doing large scale renders or animations I usually render out the full package with diffuse, GI, atmospherics, reflections/refractions, and so on so that I can make changes to it without having to render out everything again.
Here's an older post that shows how I usually composite them:
http://www.chaosgroup.com/forums/vbu...3&postcount=15

[Mats_O]

Thanks, I am going to keep this as a reference.

At the moment I am producing some 100 hires stills. Products against a lightblue background. They rest on a "floor" which is used both for GI and in addition the floor is reflective. However I want to be able to switch the background to any color but keep the reflection in the floor. I have been playing around with the floor as a matte using the VRayMtlWrapper but end up with having to render the floor twice with different materials, one for GI and one for reflection.

What strategy would you use in such a project?

[Mats_O]

Depends on what I'm doing. for regular sized still pictures I generally render everything out normally while adding ZDepth, unclamped colors (if needed), multimatte for compositing, and whatever else I think I'll need. When doing large scale renders or animations I usually render out the full package with diffuse, GI, atmospherics, reflections/refractions, and so on so that I can make changes to it without having to render out everything again.
Here's an older post that shows how I usually composite them:
http://www.chaosgroup.com/forums/vbu...3&postcount=15

In your EXR composite, would you put the DOF and MBlur effects on top of the composite result?

[rivoli]

At the moment I am producing some 100 hires stills. Products against a lightblue background. They rest on a "floor" which is used both for GI and in addition the floor is reflective. However I want to be able to switch the background to any color but keep the reflection in the floor.

for the time being you need a separate pass for the reflections matte, don't know if things are going to change for sp3. something along these lines:

http://www.chaosgroup.com/forums/vbu...ighlight=matte

[Shimakaze]

In your EXR composite, would you put the DOF and MBlur effects on top of the composite result?

Yes, but usually just one of them and not both at the same time. It depends on what I want which normally means DOF for stills and MBlur for animations.