Render element individual bit rate

[MF_Danny]

Hi there folks!

So as I'm aware the zdepth render element always saves out as a 32bit exr no matter what bit rate you're saving out as. It is possible to do this with other render elements? Say the velocity element. Ie Beauty and whatever else is being saved as 16bit but velocity is saved as 32bit.

Cheers,
Danny

[TheScope]

It would be really cool if we could specify the bitrate for each render element individually.

Cheers, Florian

[hermit.crab]

There are a few variants for the color-depth of render elements when saving Exrs, depending on the image format options chosen (either 16bit or 32bit):

1. Saving the Exr as 32-bit - all render channels will be saved as 32-bit
2. Saving the Exr as 16-bit - the render channels will be divided into three groups
a) Render elements saved as 16-bit
b) Render elements saved as 32-bit (forced) - for elements that measure distance (i.e. Z-depth, World positions)
c) Render elements where you can choose either 16-bit or 32-bit - Currently only the VRayExtraTex

There currently isn't an option to individually set color-depths of render elements, hence if you wish to output your velocity channel as 32-bit, you would have to save the Exr, along with all its passes, as 32-bit.

[ali_cgi]

Plus one for controlling each element, bit depth and dwaa compression separately, more specifically for samplerinfo and extratex channel.

[TheScope]

I just tested this (Maya 2019, V-Ray 4.30.00). EXR set to 16 bit and compression to auto. All render elements are saved as 16 bit float. Including Z-Depth, and two Sampler Info set to WPP and normal.

So how do I get a world position pass that is forced to 32 bit?

2. Saving the Exr as 16-bit - the render channels will be divided into three groups
a) Render elements saved as 16-bit
b) Render elements saved as 32-bit (forced) - for elements that measure distance (i.e. Z-depth, World positions)
c) Render elements where you can choose either 16-bit or 32-bit - Currently only the VRayExtraTex

[hermit.crab]

The Z-Depth and World Positions elements are in fact saved as forced 32-bit color depth (when saving multi-channel exrs). You can test this out by checking if the elements' pixel values can exceed 65535 or alternatively use an Exr data reading tool from the internet.

[yolov]

As Aleksandar pointed out - those two channels are always forced to 32 bits. So far this has only been done for multi-channel exr files only, but in our stable builds this is already working for single-channel files too. The change will also go out with our next update.