Render Layers

[Infrared digital]

Hi

It would be good to have the ability to render in layers so that if my scene has foreground, mid ground and background elements that they can be rendered in full in one render including all the respective render elements.

Also, being able to render a character or car with their shadows, AO, reflections etc.. in one render pass would be magic. Currently we have to do that in two renders.

Thanks

N

[joconnell]

Deep kind of addresses the layered part - what do you comp in?

[Infrared digital]

I usually use AE but I have teamed up with a Nuke compositor however I am still learning it - it's a big bit of kit !

Deep is on the list to learn but any suggestions that you have John would be welcome.

[joconnell]

To be honest it's less of a vray thing and more of a 3dsmax thing - there's no easy solution to render layers and it's something that's been missing for a number of years for production or vfx work. You're looking at using something like Lukashi pass manager or RPManager, and even then you won't get all three of your passes out as one render, it'd be you setting up the passes and rpmanager automating the submitting of those to deadline or backburner as three separate jobs. Dave Wortley has something he's been working on for a while but I'm not sure what the situation is with that as regards commercial availability.

[Morbid Angel]

I second what joconnell said. For example lets say you want to get a shadow pass with your beauty pass but all in one render. This means that the shadow will be occluded by the object in some areas where the object is in contact with the ground. If you try to separate them, you will get edging issues in those points. So you have to render the shadow with the object invisible for camera. Unless you set this up manually there isn't any way, any of the render engines out there can do that for you. Since a renderer or a software cannot know what shadow on which plane you need to separate etc.