Render lights in different layers for full control

#1

Hello,

I am using maya 2010 and mental ray.

I am rendering the different layers of my short to move on into Fusion and create the final image.

I want to render the lights in different layers so I have full control over them during compositing.
One of my teachers say that I should create render pases which I have tried and haven´t been very sucsesfull and an other one told me to create a render layer for each light with the geometry in it.

Which is the best solution? Do you know any tutorial that explains how to use the render pases or how to separate lights for final render?

Thanks!

#2

You do this via contribution maps. It falls apart if you use any GI, becouse that doesn’t get affected when you change each lights intensity/color in comp.

#3

I have used contribution maps with final gather. In the examples I have attached you can see three images.
1)beuty pass made with the key light
2)indirect pass with the ambient light (a semi_sphere with a surface shader)
3)MasterBeauty

As you can se in the indirect pass image, the wall is black and in the key_light image it doesn’t even appear.

Waht am I doing wrong?

Thank you

#4

You don’t need to use contribution maps at all.

  1. Select all the geo in your scene and the light you want to render and put them into a new render layer. Do this for every light or group of lights that you want to render seperately.

  2. Render the seperate layers.

  3. When compositing, multiply the layers together.

This isn’t the ideal way to get control over you lights but will work.

#5

You don’t need to use contribution maps at all.

The advantage of using contribution maps is its just a single render, instead of x times for each light. Way more efficent.

  1. When compositing, multiply the layers together.

Don’t you mean Add?

I dont have maya at work, so I cant check your scene.

#6

I was thinking on doing the render as LowJack said becouse my results with contribution maps are wrong but I don´t know if in an animated shot the result would be acurret.

I will try looking for more info regarding passes before choosing this other possibity.
In any case, thank you both for your help!

#7

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