MultiMatteElement, more layers.

[Dave_Wortley]

We render to EXR but don't include all the render elements as we generally find it slower to use this workflow, we end up with a lot of MME (Multi-matte-elements), what would be nice would be if you could have all the MME in one multi-layered EXR file as integer not as float to keep the file-size down.

[m_hinks]

Yes that would be good. It all helps! Those naughty exr's do get large!

[vlado]

Hm, but that won't work with antialiasing, would it?

Best regards,
Vlado

[Dave_Wortley]

Technically you should be able to have one exr file with many many 8bit channels, with just white/black output, with own antialising per layer. This would save in comp having to extract red/blue/green as you'd just reference a channel instead, 1 channel per gbuffer ID.

It works in my head but you tell me Vlado You get antialising with 2 different MME masks.

[instinct]

Technically you should be able to have one exr file with many many 8bit channels, with just white/black output, with own antialising per layer. This would save in comp having to extract red/blue/green as you'd just reference a channel instead, 1 channel per gbuffer ID.

It works in my head but you tell me Vlado You get antialising with 2 different MME masks.

You can have many channels in a single file. That is not different to having multiple layers with rgb each. Technically layers do not exists, only channels do. If you have MMREs in a multichannel EXR you can do just that already, simply reference the corresponding channel. This is not integer tho. RenderID is an integer channel for example and these do not have AA. 8Bit is not part of the EXR spec. You can be either 16bit Half or 32bit. So if you have a bunch of multiMattes, save to default multichannel EXR (16bit half) then you should have just that. Unless i am not understanding you there.

Regards,
Thorsten

[vlado]

Like Thorsten noted, the EXR files do not support 8-bits. We could pack the RGBA colors into one 32-bit integer, but I don't know if any other programs understand that.

Best regards,
Vlado