We assembled an adequate birthday present for VRay (info) and we are releasing one of our most used internal plugins to the public. We wrote this about a half year ago and in the meanwhile there’s hardly a single rendering here that doesn’t use several multimatte elements.
What it basically does is it generates an alpha matte based on object or Mat IDs and puts it on the RGB Channels of the Renderelement. Along with the upcoming exr writer this is a real killer tool. It allows you to render an infinite amount of antialiased alpha mattes with a single renderpass. Including dof and motion blur.
There were already several wishes for this on the Wishlist an we’d rather see Vlado working on the cool stuff instead of rewriting something we already have :). He already agreed to include it in upcoming builds right away.
awesome.. been listening to instinct gloat about this for what seems like years in irc > hope to get to play with it soon!
Is there a specific version of vray needed? seems to fail to load on the 1.50.R3 thats available to us normal peons on the real download site. It throws up an error code 126: specified module could not be found
Well it’s actually pretty straight forward to use. Add it as a Renderelement. In the Controls you can turn on/off the three mattechannels per renderelement wich will be stored in R, G and B channel of the element. The spinner allows you to set the ID that should be used for the respective channel. Now in default mode the ID used is the G-Buffer-ID (or Object-ID). If you turn on MaterialID on the bottom it will use Material Effect IDs that are set via the mat-editor. You can add the Element as often as needed and generate as many mattes as needed in a single pass. Just be sure that they are all differently named as that seemed to cause problems sometimes.
