I guess I don’t really get how some of these render layers work with Messiah. Especially shadows.
It seems as though the shadow buffer just spits out a very binary kind of image. Black or white. No matter what bit depth you pick.
I can’t use this in a comp. . . it would look. . . very bad.
In Lightwave when you render out the buffers you get something that makes a lot more sense.
See how it gradates from black to white?
Could there be something in the tone mapping that I’m missing?
:curious:
Taron is using it all the time with his ZbornToy. I’m Guessing there is a trick to it. Something that defines the min-max for depth.
The docs are a little lacking in that reguard.
Ok depth does work. What you need to do is define the min/max values. You can parent a Null to your camera and slide it along it’s Z till you hit the farthest point in your scene. Take that Z value and put it into your “Maximum Value” of your Depth buffer. For me it was 36. Then make sure to check the “Modify Output Buffer” checkbox.
I’ll bet I have to do something like this for the shadow buffer too.
Sad to say Wegg but this must be a bug, the shadow buffer just gives me crap, a dark image (looks like yours if I run auto levels on it in PhotoShop, guess you also brighten it right??) The the “Modify Output Buffer” also seams useless in this case, it did nothing with the ShadowBuffer when I tryed it!?
/ Svante
…ok then what are the remaining 47 bits doing? He he:applause: Poor PMG!:rolleyes:
/ Svante
Hi Wegg, I having troubles to rendender my sadow layers. I have tried to do it of 2 different forms, using the camera´s ground and using a poligon mesh a ground.
Whenever I rendering my scene, obtain a completely black image, without shadows information, what i´m doing bad?
what type of light am I use? I`m using a sphere light.
Thanks
AFAIK the shadow buffer is more or less a buffer that shows you where in the image a shadow might appear from how it looks - test it with a non-blurred shadow to see what I mean.
So, instead of delivering the actual shadow for compositing, it seems to give you the area in which messiah has to activate it’s “render a shadow” function (white for Yes and black for No). I have no idea what a user should do with it.
Internally from the SDK I get exactly the same (one of the first things I tested when image buffers became available some years ago).
I don’t know why they exposed that to the user at all. It is not usable for anything.
Good luck finding a workaround,
Cheers,
The work around is pretty simple. You just create a material that is white, then turn translucency on and diffuse off. This creates a surface that catches shadows but when exposed to light seems to create a very clean, pure white object that only shows shadows. You have to mess around with hiding objects from the camera but making sure they still cast shadows as well.
A “real” shadow buffer like the one from Lightwave would be a heck of a lot easier.
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