Render Elements with Composite Materials

[Viscacha]

We have several materials in several scenes that are composite materials and we are trying to render elements for the scenes. All of the materials within the composite are Vray Materials. When rendering the RGB Color pass renders fine, also the render id, and Velocity channels render fine, but the diffuse, GI, shadows, etc.... render those elements black. I could write a very long explaination for why we need the materials as composite mats, but lets just say we do. I can explain in later posts if it helps. Here are a couple of example images to help explain. Any suggestions or work arounds would be great.

[Morbid Angel]

why do you use composite material? its slow, and redundant... and obviously its a max material so it will cause problems.

[Dra(hen]

Hey Everyone, I work with Viscacha, and I just wanted to provide a little more explanation of the setup we are having problems with.

We are working on a scene that is a large landscape (a canyon) that we are doing an animation through. We are using a composite material to create a ground textrue that covers a large area without being a several GB texture file. There is a base ground texture, several layers of different types of grass and vegetation, and a couple of gravel layers. Each of these texture maps is probably not bigger than 800x800 and set to tile multiple times across the landscape. We have painted a few alpha channels of a larger resolution to mask out each of these tiled textures to come up with a ground texture that is not repetetive and doesn't bog down our network trying to load up all of these massive texture files.

We have tested both Composite and Blend Shaders in this effort and neither of them show up in the render elements. We have also tested using a Composite Map in the Diffuse Channel of a Vray material. This works, but the alpha channel has to be embedded in the image file rather than having an opacity slot to load it in separately. This woudl allow you to use the same texture later with a different alpha. On top of this the whole structure would have to be replicated for other Maps like Bump and any others. We have also tried Mix maps in the Diffuse slot, and while this allows you to load in your alpha separately, you are restricted to two sub maps, requiring you to load mix maps inside of mix maps.

While it has been our experience that Vray Materials render faster and better than scanline, we are not aware of a Vray equivalent to the Composite or Blend Shaders. If anyone knows of a way to create layered shaders or layered textures in a manner other than described above and that will show up in render elements it would be a HUGE help.

Thanks guys
Lee

[Morbid Angel]

you may want to check out this plugin
http://www.maxplugins.de/r6_files/gohara/sciAnaComp.zip

while it wont allow you to load alphas, it will alow you to blend textures in modes similar to photoshop layers. You may also try vrayCompositeMap.
I would highly suggest to stay away from blend/composite/shellac shader types, for number of reasons. One of them being not full support, but also slow renderings... double or some times quadruple the render times.