So I did some digging around the forums here, but was unable to find a clear answer to this...
Multimattes allow you to create RGB mattes based on integers assigned either to the geo (objectID) or material (MaterialID). This however does not work for the sub-materials in a Blend Material. You can assign a materialID to the blend material itself as a whole, but not pass it through from the sub-materials.
Material ID pass. As I understand it, it is not possible, programming-wise, to fix this because of the integer numbers used in a multimatte. It is however possible to pass color values. So one could make a Material ID pass where colors are input in the sub-material's material ID attribute. This does work with a Blend Material.
The problem is that rather than being able to assign multiple sets of RGB mattes in a scene, one can only assign the color red once for the entire scene etc. Since most scenes will have several mattes, this approach of extracting primary colors for a matte (RGB) does not work. It would be possible to assign unique non-primary colors but this is less ideal since it is hard to extract these in Nuke, and hard to keep track of (we have spreadsheets that list the matte ID numbers for each asset. Integers are a lot easier to keep track of on a spreadsheet than random colors).
RenderID pass. Another possibility is a RenderID pass. This outputs multiple colors. The problem here is that
(1) they are not user defined which makes is problematic to set up a master comp template for the mattes since the colors will change in each shot.
(2) while one can easily shuffle out RGB in Nuke, it is more difficult to extract other colors.
Material Select. This brings me to the material select which outputs the beauty render of just the selected material. What we need however is not the material but rather a matte. There was some discussion of implementing this on the forums, but I am not sure if this has happened for 3.0 or not. The render element has two inputs: "material" and "materials" which is rather confusing, and I am unable to find documentation on it. Is there a way to output a matte for a material with this pass?
TLDR: In sum, I want to be able to create user defined mattes for materials, including sub-materials passing through a blend material.
Multimattes allow you to create RGB mattes based on integers assigned either to the geo (objectID) or material (MaterialID). This however does not work for the sub-materials in a Blend Material. You can assign a materialID to the blend material itself as a whole, but not pass it through from the sub-materials.
Material ID pass. As I understand it, it is not possible, programming-wise, to fix this because of the integer numbers used in a multimatte. It is however possible to pass color values. So one could make a Material ID pass where colors are input in the sub-material's material ID attribute. This does work with a Blend Material.
The problem is that rather than being able to assign multiple sets of RGB mattes in a scene, one can only assign the color red once for the entire scene etc. Since most scenes will have several mattes, this approach of extracting primary colors for a matte (RGB) does not work. It would be possible to assign unique non-primary colors but this is less ideal since it is hard to extract these in Nuke, and hard to keep track of (we have spreadsheets that list the matte ID numbers for each asset. Integers are a lot easier to keep track of on a spreadsheet than random colors).
RenderID pass. Another possibility is a RenderID pass. This outputs multiple colors. The problem here is that
(1) they are not user defined which makes is problematic to set up a master comp template for the mattes since the colors will change in each shot.
(2) while one can easily shuffle out RGB in Nuke, it is more difficult to extract other colors.
Material Select. This brings me to the material select which outputs the beauty render of just the selected material. What we need however is not the material but rather a matte. There was some discussion of implementing this on the forums, but I am not sure if this has happened for 3.0 or not. The render element has two inputs: "material" and "materials" which is rather confusing, and I am unable to find documentation on it. Is there a way to output a matte for a material with this pass?
TLDR: In sum, I want to be able to create user defined mattes for materials, including sub-materials passing through a blend material.
Comment