G-buffer and AA

[Austin]

Is there a way to give more AA to certain g-buffer channels, such as specular, shadow, and refraction? I've tried high settings on qmc, subdivision, even fixed, but with no results. If not, is there a work-around other than faking those passes?

I thought I had remembered reading once that there was a way to do this, but I can't find it; so I might have just imagined it. I do that a lot.

[Morbid Angel]

Austin, at this point we dont use gbuffer, and use the other methods of compositing pasesses. For example for shadow you can make vraymtl wrapper and put it into override slot in globals, that will produce shadows only pass. Then you can do the same for specualrs.

[percydaman]

Give RPManager a try. Its a very well put together render pass manager. Makes setting up passes pretty darn easy.

[Austin]

Austin, at this point we dont use gbuffer, and use the other methods of compositing pasesses.

I was hoping nobody was going to say that


Percy, I just downloaded the trial and I'm about to try it out. Thanks for the headsup on that one, it looks like a really handy program.

[rpc212]

Dmitry why don't you use G-Buffers? Just wondering.

Is it only because of the lack of AA on certain channels or other reasons?

[Morbid Angel]

no its more then that. here are some examples:

1 - gbuffer does not support any other materials then vrayMtl, which means that if you have complex networks of shellacs and custom shaders such as highlight only or other types they will not be considered in gbuffer. Same goes for speculars of those unsuported mats.

2 - gbuffers at this point have issues with aa, as we know. this is an addition to many problems we'r having as is.

3 - by default outputs rgb and alpha pass with no option to turn it off, so if you are outputting hundreds of shots with many passes each one will have rgb and alpha file sequences along with the actual passes, this just makes hussle going in and deleting them later.

4 - gbuffer is not supported by DR, not that it really matters but just pointing it out.

In general tho, I like to have as much control as possible from a pass. So, when you output like a specular pass its best to setup a scene with that pass prepared exectly how you want it, which might be different from the actual gbuffered version.

There are positive things about gbuffer too, things like RPF motion data, which can be output into rpf and then used to produce 2.5D motion blur in post or raw gi which can be used to catch the object emitted gi and the composited - this actually works better then straight rendering of gi emittion from rgb pass. Shadow pass I usually use vrayMtl wrapper in shader override with value -1.
Thats about it. Im afraid tho that aa issue of gbuffer is not going to go away, making it problematic to work with the gbuffers. As I've seen in the past, trying to use some badly aa gbuffer passes to comp other elemets just produce too jagged edge effects that are just unacceptable.

The end.