Render Elements

[mouj]

Howdy !

Indeed there is a way to render a scene in seperate files/layers, including shadow, reflection, diffuse, specular, Zdepth and so on, to be composited back together later on; it uses the rla and rlf file format, which enable you to save as seperate files each of the above mentioned channels.
Render Element is quite simple to use, imho, and rollouts kind of speak for themselves in terms of features and suchs...

you could take a look here, the article is more about Combustion's use to comp together rendered elements, but you'll see what render elements is all about:
http://www.cgarchitect.com/upclose/article9_TB.asp

mind you that render elements i think only works with Max's scanline engine.

mouj

[TobiX]

thanks for the quick answer

but I have still a question:
is it possible to render one single object onto its own layer with shadow casting? I had the idea to use a mate material, but it seams to be very complicated. Is that the only solution?

[mouj]

What you'd want is the object ans it's shadow casting on the same layer, and seperated from the rest of the scene ?

I'm not quite sure to understand what you want, i guess to keep the object's self shadows and proper illumination while having it on a seperate layer from the rest of the scene, you could render the object while hidding all other objects/environements and save this image as tga or tiff to keep the alpha channel, then render the whole scene, and using the alpha of the previous pic you'd be able to clean cut the object from the scene, but you won't save any shadow casting that way.

I think (might be wrong) that shadow casting you'll only be able to isolate on a seperate layer/file using render elements, but then it will be on a channel of its own.

hope this can help somehow
mouj

[TobiX]

hm... probably I didn´t get the real purpose and meaning of compositing, but I saw some pics of an animated film during production and they renderd the fur on its own layer. So my thoughts were to render things on seperat layers and put them together afterwards. So I wouldn´t have to render the whole environment, but only one part of it and exchange it in compositing.

[mouj]

Howdy !

Maybe i did not make myself understandable, but did you at least read the article i pointed out ?
If compositing is what you're looking for, then, go for Render Elements, that's the way to go.

That kind of "technique" with the alpha channel has nothing to do with compositing in fact, it's merely a technique to save an object out from environement correctly rendered/illuminated.

mouj

[gaggle]

In essence, Render Elements indeed allows you to seperate, say, all the shadows in a scene. In that way, you can control the intensity of the shadows completly seperate in a Post Production program (e.g. Combustion, Digital Fusion, After Effects).

But if you want objects, and their shadows and everything, into seperate files, Render Elements won't cut it. You'll need to check out the Matte/Shadow material, and set up a scene where everything except what you want rendered out has that map applied. This way you can render out an object and all the shadows it casts, and composite it together later. Yes, that means seperate scenes per object-group.

For what it's worth I'd love to have the ability to "group" objects together somehow and get them out into seperate files. I think Rezn8 (www.rezn8.com) had/has a layermanager extension that allowed this functionality. I never tested it much at the time, but it seemed extremly cool.

[TobiX]

Thank you guys very much!

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