rendering image format

#1

Hello,

I don’t know if this is the correct section for my question, sorry if not.

I am having a debate with two of my teachers regarding which file format I should use for rendering.

I am using mental ray in maya 2010.

One of them sais that I should use tiff uncompressed and the otherone recomends png, openEXR or tiff LWZ. (This last teacher is more familiar with 3dsMax)

The first one sais that maya dosen´t work well with png and that there are many programes that don’t sopport openEXR lusing many channel information.
Loking at the options and searching the internet, mental ray for maya doesn`t sopport tiff LWZ.

What would you recomend?

Thanks!

#2

OpenEXR is the way to go! Even if your compositing application doesn’t support the extra channels (what are you compositing with that can’t read an EXR?) it’s worth it for the higher bit-depth.

Compressed tiff images don’t always play nice in all software (like mental rey) so I don’t recommend using it, compressing a png is slow but the image quality is nice and you can save to high bit-depth. For Maya you can render 8 and 16-bit .iff images which is the maya standard.

Test your OpenEXR images in your compositing pipeline to see if they work properly for what you need. If they will work I can’t think of a reason not to use EXR.

#3

I was told that affter effects doesn’t support EXR. I composit with Fusion but you never know if you will need any other compositing software to use some of there special tools.
I just wanted to be sure and not to run into any isues if possible.

I will experiment with EXR and see what results I end up with.

Thanks for your help uncon.

#4

Forget everything you heard and or know. Use openEXR and adapt yourself to it. And please don’t steal my idea of a car plate labeled “EXR 32B”. Serious, don’t steal it please.

I must add that when I render directly for AVID MC5 (no composite work) I render in TIFF 16 bit + alpha though. That’s just because of Avid limitation, but then I’m not rendering multi-passes in this case.

Why EXR? Apart from the quality, it’s the only format that can contain as many channels (R,G,B,A, Zdepth, Reflections, AO and so on) as you want… in one file! It’s HDR but on mega steroids lol…

#5

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