AA for Material ID channel.

[Kyle_Grace]

I have always used PSD manager for mask generating, but due to time constraints, I've found that recently i've started to use the Material ID channel of the frame buffer as a quick way of generating material masks, however the frustrating thing being that this channel is not anti-aliased and hence leads to masking issues in Photoshop. Is there some I am missing? Or a work around I don't know about?

At the moment I've taken to using the wire-colour channel instead as this is anti-aliased. The problem being that I have to 'select-by-material' then change the wire colour of the objects. Which kind of defeats the 'quickness' aspect to what I was trying to achieve.

P.S- Does the forum's minimum search word length (3 letters) piss anyone else off? I find I can't search for common terms such as 'DR, AA, ID' etc.

Cheers,

[vlado]

Currently the only work-around is the V-Ray wire color channel, as you have found out. We will see if we can implement antialiasing for the material ID for future versions.

Best regards,
Vlado

[instinct]

For the search : you can use placeholders to do shorter searches (e.G. "DR*")

For the masks i'd suggest using MultiMatte instead. It does generate proper Alpha and it creates pure RGB channels (as many as you need) wich provide correct masking instead of lousy color-selections in PS. It also works with Material IDs not only Object IDs.

Regards,
Thorsten

[m_hinks]

Its only a shame there is no way to have more than 3 in each layer. I understand that there are only 3 colours of course! but its a bit of a pain to have to have say 3 or 4 multimatte elements each with 3 masks. Im not complaining, I do really like the new element, and use it daily, but there are benifits of using something like PSD manager for masks. You can add all you groups/objects and get all the masks on one hit.

Its a long shot, but is there any way a render element could be made so that it will store all ids as seperate layers in a file?

[instinct]

Well if the only target were apps that can properly handle EXRs then it would be pretty easy as channels and layers as they are called in exr can be pretty freely configured. Outputting a PSD that is readily masked quite cumbersome i'd imagine as PSD is a closed format :/

Regards,
Thorsten

[m_hinks]

Yeah I agree Thorsten, EXR is so powerful that it could handle lots of mask layers. AE is still not great with EXR, others like nuke, fusion, and combustion I think are much better tho.

Vlado would have to tell us if this would be possible. PSD might be an option as PSD manager can do it, but I imagine the programmers would have to weigh up the amount of time it would take to implement, over spending their time on other things. Maybe if this is a viable option, we could take a forum vote as see how Vray users would like this addition? I imagine a quick, trouble free method of getting object/group masks out with the render would appeal to many still image users.

We shall have to see!

[instinct]

Actually nuke is the only tool out there that properly handles EXR files. Fusion can import multilayer exrs yes, but it creates a seperate input node for each layer... The general architecture and approach of almost all comp and paint apps out there rules out proper use of exr sadly. Nuke's architecture is actually built around the concepts of EXR and that was the best idea ever.

Regards,
Thorsten

[m_hinks]

I stand corrected! I have never used Nuke, but I think I remember you use it a lot, and have seen some of your making of videos? I will have to look in to it more, but I dont think my new employer will like me much if I suggest spending a lot of money right away. Ill have to put up and stut up