Request: Rendering masks without rendering beauty-pass

[pixelwerk]

One thing i loved about MODO was the ability to quickly render passes without the need to re-render the beauty-pass again. Especially when you realize after rendering a job, that you need to render out some additional masks or other passes like z-channel, alpha, shading-normals, motion vector,....that do not require a complete re-render of your scene.

Of course this can be done by manually disabling not required options in your rendersettings to speed up the rendering. But it would be convenient if there would be some "Smart-Rendersettings" option that, once Final Color Output is disabled, checks automatically what kind of renderoutputs are still enabled and regarding to this enables or disables temporary not needed options like "Don't render final image", "Glossy Effects", "SSS
enabled"

Or some kind of "rendering masks-only override" in your global options for these non-renderintensive outputs.

[EDELVIZ_ARCH]

I have come across the same problem, and have resorted to rendering the alpha channels in Modo. But that of cause is not the best solution.

It would be great, to have this fixed

[pixelwerk]

So far i also rely on this "Frankenrendering" approach, like in the past pixars renderman used external renderers for raytracing tasks, since it had no raytracing integrated at this time. I know that MODO is the only renderengine out there that offers this option out-of-the-box so actually it's nothing that needs to be "fixed" because nothing is broken, but it would be a great additional option and useful for every implementation out there, not only for MODO.

[boyan]

Hey Guys,

Thank's for the posts. Definitely, It will be a nice feature. I will keep you posted!

BR Boyan

[GidPDX]

+1

I'm having to use MODO's too for this purpose. It's OK, but the renders don't actually match up as good as I'd like for everything. I'm only doing stills right now- can't imagine what a paint it would be with animation.

[BVA]

+1 please. It can be really useful and save time!

[neverko]

+1, very useful feature.

[carsonjones]

Agreed - being able to target and render out any kind of pass would be nice. Alpha's especially.

[vlado]

Normally in 3ds Max and Maya this is done simply by overriding the scene matrials with some default material (f.e. black, perhaps with a self-illuminated falloff map to capture edges better), maybe something similar can be done for Modo...

Best regards,
Vlado

[pixelwerk]

Normally in 3ds Max and Maya this is done simply by overriding the scene matrials with some default material (f.e. black, perhaps with a self-illuminated falloff map to capture edges better), maybe something similar can be done for Modo...

Best regards,
Vlado

Of course this can be done like in MAYA with a material override to speed up the renderings and as mentioned before manually reducing the settings by disabling GI aso. Sometimes it's hard to get the original rendersetting back, once you have adjusted your scene and several settings, just to render out an additional mask quickly. MODO is quite convenient when it comes to this:
www.pixelwerk.at/Downloads/MODO_Masks.mp4

While I was messing around with the setting to find out what is needed and what options I can disable I got some strange results.


I set up a scene in MODO, created a default material override and added a SURFACE ID renderoutput to a group, so actually the Surface ID shouldn't be calculated for the whole scene, instead just for a bunch of meshes in my scene (labeled here as "actual surface ID") but wasn't able to reproduce that with V-Ray because it calculated the Surface ID for the whole scene, not for the masked group. So i updated the scene to get the same results and let MODO render the SURFACE ID also for the whole scene. The rendering took MODO around 8 seconds. Now i tried to set-up V-Ray to match this rendertime by manually disabling parameters like GI, EIS, Reflections, Refractions, SSS, Maps. I got down to around 5 seconds by disabling the lights, but i got partly bad antialiasing-results. Not for the whole scene, partly it was really smooth, but partly i got really jagged edges. I nailed it down to the "Use light" option. I was able to get this renderoutput down to around 29 seconds by disabling the shadows, but it's still far from the 8 seconds of MODO.

[bbgrid]

agreed, this option is needed !