If you had a scene like this could you render each part seperatly (like do a tower or wall at a time) and then composite them in Combustion? I mean can you do it so it would match it exactly as if you had rendered them all together in 3ds max? I know overlay individual parts wouldn’t be a problem but what about shadows, etc?
Thanks.
Compositing elements is a common practice, and is fairly easy to do.
Not only can you render out individual elements, like a tower or a wall, but you can also tell max to render passes such as shadows, highlights, colors, even Zspace and velocity if you needed. That way everything looks as it would if you rendered everything together, only with more control in a quicker manner. Compositing is really helpful for speed and color correction in post.
Hope that helps 
Thanks. Is all this done via the Rich Pixel Format? Do you know of any good links for rendering separete elements in 3ds max and then compositing in Combustion?
Thanks.
Use the render elements
Look at the help of Combustion and 3DS MAX, and foruns (cgtalk, fxguide and others)
You certainly can, I just did it this weekend. Essentially you set up Max to “Render Elements” and choose your elements. It’s important to note that Max still has to render the file, so it is not quicker, in the literal sense, to render the elements. That is; if you just want a shadow element, Max still has to render out the whole thing and gives you the full colour version + a shadow. The thing is, it doesn’t really cost any more rendering time to do the elements, so you may as well!
Gives you much, much more control over your composite work in terms of colour correcting/effects. I pretty much do at least diffuse, shadow, specular and z-depth for all renders now and bring them into combustion for post. They look 100% better after a bit of fixing up.
The advantage of RPF file format is that it works hand in hand with Combustion. It provides more information than standard files, such as velocity, G-buffer etc which can be used by Combustion to do 3D post effects, such as 3D motion blur.
Also, in the Render Elements tab of the Render Dialog you can choose to output to a combustion workspace, so all your separate elements are automatically arranged nicely 
Keep in mind that different elements need to use different transfer modes when you lay them on top of each other. For example, the specular layer is usually layed over the top in “Screen mode”
In the ultimate versions of MAX8 and Combustion4 the necessity of the use of rpf diminished therefore now the MAX8 sufficiently exports now exports several other channels for render elements and the Combustion can combine these information using the G-buffer builder . The Max also can create an.CWS file automatically
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