Render Element Question

Hi everyone,

I’m trying to save out some render elements of Material ID or even Node ID. I’m rendering an animation in Max8-sp3 and 1.47.03 vray. When I tell the Frame Buffer to save separate G-Buffer channels it does not save the Mat ID or Node ID as TIF files. It does save me Atmosphere, Z-Depth, and Alpha. I am using Backburner to render the images, do I need to use DR instead? Is there a setting somewhere I’m missing?

Thanks for any help.

jhiler- the best fix for this is to upgrade to 1.5. Render elements in 1.5 have been worked on alot.

I’m not sure but I think you need to render out as a .rpf to get those channels. I wouldn’t upgrade to 1.5 because it is extremely buggy imho.

“extremely buggy”

Thats a bit harsh.
What makes you say that?
Most people here now use it in production.

Between the render hangs and the material editor problems we have decided to revert back to Max8.0 and 1.47. We have been unable to succesfully run animations without render hangs which is a huge liability on short deadline jobs. We are using x64 so that maybe the 32bit version is a little more stable.

Yeah unfortunately there was those few bugs… the render hangs were most likely due to 2d displacement going into infinite loops, and the ME problems have been fixed in the RC4 releases.

Certainly not what I would called extreeme tho… but then again if you have lots of tight deadlines… You could ask for an updated build from Vlado and see if it solves all your problems. Pretty sure it would.

Unfortunately we have an updated release and it doesnt seem to fix the problems. I haven’t personally used it but our TD says it doesnt fix the issues. I must admit that we have not had as many issues doing stills but animations with 1.5 have been real painfull. Thanks for the suggesion though.

Actually I have been experiencing some pretty horrible issues with r2 on max8. (Didn’t want to upgrade in mid production). The issue, after lots of gray hairs and hours of me crying in the corner in a fetal position, turned out to be caused by motion blur. I never ran into these issues with 1.47. (actually, only with 1.5 r2).
I am going to test one of the scenes inmax9 with r3 to see if its gone, but if its still there, Vlado will be receiving one pretty large winrar file from me :wink:

Hi jhiler,
Did you manage to resolve this issue without upgrading to 1.5? We’re still on 1.47.03 and experiencing the same problem. Many thanks.

The only way to save out mtl id and render id channels in V-Ray 1.47.03 is to render your main image to a .rla or .rpf file and extract those channels in a program that can read these formats.

Best regards,
Vlado

Great, thanks for the response Vlado - we’ll do it that way. Has this changed in 1.5 - can you output individual elements to targa for example?

you can now use the mtlselect render element which is fantastic