Render Passes in 1.5

[gadzooks]

Any word on on how vray will handel render passes in 1.5? Any word if it will support RPF files or combustion? just curious.

[cpnichols]

Just a side note... I think that RPF will be dead soon. Now that it is possible to embed all of this into EXR with floating point, EXR will be, IMHO, the future file format for 3D and compositing. Very, very, very powerful stuff.

Sorry, I know that does not answer your question about render passes. I know that they think it is a very important wishlist, so I am sure it must be a priority... we will see if they were able to add it to 1.5...

[Long John]

aeh, can for example combustion use EXR?

if not i would be carefull what i call dead.

EXR is not what i call a selfrunner.
i have plenty of apps that can use HDR images but not much who can use EXR.

[J_Bug]

Long John: I think you're missing one key word "future". It makes sense to me and with the support behind EXR I'm sure some companies already use it within their proprietary software.

gadzooks: I'm not sure but last I saw anything on it there was a cool little layers palette which appears with the VRay frame buffer.

--Jon

[trixian]

Combustion 3 opens and handles Open EXR images just fine.
You just need to know your way around look up tables.

[tom schuelke]

hmm.

what is the big advantage of exr. in comparison to hdri ? I am not up to date in this

And at last the 1.5 handles all Channels you will need for Compositing. Not sure how they will be saved in the final version.

We will let us surprise.

[trixian]

The major difference as I can see, is that exr can be compressed, and can contain any number of arbitrary channels, i.e z-buffer, alpha and so forth...but for some of us, even stuff like motion controll data from cameras if one is so inclined. I seem to recollect reading that it also can hold more colour values than hdri, but i'm not sure. The bottom line is, unless you can, or have someone to program for you, you won't be using it to its fullest potential as far as the channels go, but once someone slaps some code together for our apps, who knows what we may be able to do.
(Now all we need are HD cameras that can capture images in full log. space at 24 fps or more ).

[cpnichols]

Actually you can do a lot of things with EXR that you don't even "need"... You could even embed the mesh file into it... not that you would want it. What I like about EXR:

- open source so you can write what ever you want in it
- great lossless compression
- autocrop for super effeciency
- floating point that goes way beyond cineon... but is similar to HDR
- can include tons of extra channels and layers (similar to RPF)

Long John... you are right, dead is not the right word, but I predict that it will be dead in the next 2 to 4 years. Combustion will adapt EXR. Photoshop has a plugin, so does AE, Nuke supports it very well, Prman, and Max via the Splutterfish plugin. EXR is a much better solution, especially for film. We can all thank ILM for that one.

Chris