Adding material select elements?

[mfessenden]

One of the (only) nice things about the Maya render passes is that the writeToColorBuffer gives you the option to add the result to an existing channel. Is that possible with the material select render element? Right now I'm working on a 18 wheeler with several metallic & car paint shaders....each one with a matte texture for dirt & scratches. It'd be great to have that write out just one dirt pass.

[vlado]

To make sure I understand correctly: for any given texture, you want to be able to tell it to be added to a given render element, is that correct?

Best regards,
Vlado

[sewer]

Hi Vlado

Texture or Material.
If your objects have one material for example green lambert
with writeToColorBuffer connect to the same object another material (for example red lambert)
and result your render is :
master render element object with green lambert
writeToColorBuffer render element same object with red lambert
One object with two material without use render layers .

Regards
Sewer

[mfessenden]

To make sure I understand correctly: for any given texture, you want to be able to tell it to be added to a given render element, is that correct?

Best regards,
Vlado

Correct, though as sewer mentions above, it'd be nice to have the option for both textures and materials.

The tricky part is that in mental ray the texture's render pass contribution shows proper object occlusion in the scene, which works because I can insert the writeToColorBuffer nodes anywhere in my shader tree. As I mentioned above, I have several simlar vrayBlendMaterials in my scene; the base shaders in each one are the same, the difference being that there's an opacity mapped dirt layer on top of each one. It'd be great if I had the option to write all those dirt materials out to one pass ignoring the opaticty map.