M_Hinks and everyone else following mpmanager, I’ve updated it and worked on it a bit more, and a friendly vray user made an awesome donation to continue its support even more (well really just to feed me for a bit!) at any rate, try out MPManager 1.03 here.
http://www.scriptspot.com/3ds-max/mpmanager-matte-pass-manager
You can matte out objects even in xrefs on a layer basis!
You need to download both the main script and the functions file from scriptspot on that page, if you are using it for network rendering you’ll need to put the functions file on the network so each slave can see it.
Good luck Happy Matte-ing,
Colin
Good stuff. Ill have to get some time next week and try to break it!!
Well done.
looks really cool! I tried it out last night. It gets a little tougher to use when you have multiple ‘attributes’ set. For instance, you want to render out a tree pass, where the ground plane is matte but receives shadows from the trees, but you have buildings you want to have matte, but DONT want to cast shadows onto the plane or trees. Its doable I think, but you can quickly get confused as to which settings have been tagged onto which layers. Might be nice if when you tagged a layer with a matte attribute, it would save it to that layer, so if you selected another layer, and then went back, the matte attributes switched back and forth. I guess I’m a little spoiled by rpmanager 
Oh this isn’t any replacement for rpmanager ;). It sounds like you just need 2 passes, a tree w/ shadows and a house w/o them. I’d be curious to know how your ideal would work, I’m afraid I don’t quite understand.