vraynormals and saving to vrayimg

[tricky]

I am rendering quite a few render elements out at high resolutions (multimattes and vraynormals) so I am telling vray to save the render to a vrayimage file from which I will extract these channels using the vrimg2exr tool.

When I extract the vraynormals element and open the resulting exr in Photoshop, it is a black and white image and doesn't appear to be showing me the normals information properly. When I render at low resolutions and look in the Vray VFB the channel looks fine and as expected.

Could there be an issue with vraynormals and saving to vrimg files or am I doing something wrong (more likely!)

[instinct]

Well i dont know how the resulting Channel is treated by vrimg2exr as we render directly to exr and open them in nuke. But what might be a problem in PS is the fact that normals have a negative range too as they are saved as vectors pointing outwards. Just a shot in the dark

Regards,
Thorsten

[tricky]

Right - more complicated than I had hoped. I just want the coloured version saved out as an image that I can use in Photoshop and tweak colours on certain surfaces by colour picking...

[vlado]

I'll probably add an option to vrimg2exr to convert non-RGB channels into some approximate RGB representation.

Best regards,
Vlado

[tricky]

Is there any kind of workaround for this? I'd use screen grabs of the element, but my image is 4kx3k and I can't render full resolution (hence the reason for using the vray image format)

[vlado]

Hmm, you can probably try to use the exrdisplay program that comes with the OpenEXR downloads to show any channel in the .exr file on the screen.

Best regards,
Vlado