Maya Render Pass Help

#1

Hi everyone! I’m in need of some help. I’ve just become a bit familiar with Maya’s Render Layers/Pass function but I’m still somewhat shakey with it. I’m desperately trying to finish my grad film and I’ve decided that I want to render the BG as a separate image and my characters with just a beauty pass and shadows and then composite in AE. In some scenes, the character’s shadow is casted on parts of the bg and I want to extract just the shadow and my character and then bring it all together. If anyone can point me in the right direction, it will be greatly appreciated!!

#2

Try adding your background and character to a render layer and set up a shadow pass. If your compositing you can use the alpha from you beauty pass ( either the character or the background ) to mask out what you don’t want. Add the pass you want to use for masking to a new layer in after effects turn off the visablilty and set the TrkMat (beside the blending mode in your layers) to either “alpha matte (imagename)” or “alpha matte (imagename) inverted”, depending on whats approriate for your scene.

Might save you some time on rendering to use what you already have.

#3

You might want to try putting a plane behind your character and change the matte opacity to black hole. I’m not 100% sure that this will still leave a shadow, but it couldn’t hurt to test. I’m afraid I can’t accurately picture what you’re trying to do, perhaps I could think better with a screenshot?

[edit] Ignore what I just said. You may want to try a use background shader. Attached is a screen of my settings I used. In the screenshot, it’s giving me the character and the shadow all in one. And I’m pretty sure the shadow is black. If I were in your shoes, I would render out background, shadow pass (using a use bg shader on the character), and character pass. That way I could easily choose the softness and opacity of the shadow in comp. Or as the poster before me said, if you already have the character rendered out, use it’s alpha to bring the original render back in without having to rerender the character.

Also, pay close attention to my settings in the screenshot. For instance, having reflectivity on will give you and alpha of the reflection of your character. Blah! Took me forever to realize that.

#4

Thanks ya’ll for the suggestions!! I ended up using the background shader for the ground and everything else that my character casted a shadow on. Then I rendered everything out on its seperate layer and it’s working fine. crydrk, I had the same problem when I started using the background shader and it was driving me mad…luckily I figured it out without going insane! Thanks again ya’ll!! :beer:

#5

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