composite: render passes order + operation
 

Iknow this is a maya section but it is th section that gets the most hits/use

so i am learning compositing
i will be using mental ray for the rendering

now there are like 47 passes by default that maya MR will output (i have turned all on, i want to learn them all)
could some one help me out here

i want to know what order the composite goes in, i.e diffuse then spec and so on

also what layer/merge operation is need for each
i.e over, plus, multiply

i have attached a .txt with a list of the passes

could someone edit is into order with operations please

i know its a BIG ask but it will help me out a lot

many thanks

Dude, nice to see you again!


Have a look at the following books for a guide, its not going to cover all the passes but just the major ones, Maya 6 (think theres an 8 out now) the complete reference and After effects in production, theygo over the basics

A lot of the others are specific for what you need but they should get you going.

Then again not toriedit (As I aint installed it ) maya 10 goes straitgh to toxic so that should give a default.

Cheers

Steve

cheers dude will look into it

been busy with uni moved onto programming for this industry now rather than 'art/animation' work
working on some plugins for nuke and maya now.
got my major 3rd yr proj to do when uni starts back up
so will be very busy soon
started up comping in fusion ow moved to nuke
from what i hear toxic is pants and no studios use it tending to go for nuke now that shake got killed off
but fusions 3d toolset is immense

u working in a studio?

Me, nah man research/teaching based.

Coding a lot in matlab, for a lot of high levle maths based stuff, love it, if you get more maths based have a look into it its a lovely bit of kit. Maya and C++ are great with the API, though can be a bit fiddely!

Done a bit of coding over the years, what do you use?

The thing with toxic was just that it would pass something, in an order that you may be able to use? Get into the code and go from there?? Thought.

Not even bothereed to load Maya 10, not even sure if the disks have match mover and toxis on them, not even looked! We tend to keep a year behind so that everything works with other softwares an such

well this will be for nuke so toxic is not needed.

matlab looks nice, looks very technical
miss my maths a lot used to be up there now its a bit rusty, shouldnt take long to polish though

at the mo i used to do mel but now do mainly python since its the back end of everything.
also c++ and opengl but im still learning this but shouldnt be too bad after python, any books/site u recommend for c++
looks like i will do some tcl as well

as i said im goin into my 3rd yr uni so i gotta write toolsets for the industry, researching that now with some studios up town and the foundry

At my work we use maya 2008 and shake. some people are learning nuke now, but shake is whats mainly used. :)

Hey mate, hows it going?

Chucking every pass on is a bad idea, as a lot of them won't do anything practical with out an initial set up, plus lots of unnecessary render time.

The main stuff you need to know is that anything shadow/occlusion based is usually multipled in comp, and anything reflection/etc based is added.

Chris

i spoke to MPC and they said they are moving to nuke as there is no support for shake as only the sdk is available.
also spoke to the foundry and they seem to have a very long list of clients in london, so thats y im focusing on nuke



not bad
found work yet?

im not rendering out every layer, i just want a dictionary of passes that i can use as a lookup for furture renders
i would be able to pick out what passes i have
i am writing an openEXR loader for nuke,
this list will automate the file loading in nuke, setting up all merges with correct operationa nad shuffles all in the correct order

i have got all the script working apart from the fact i dont know what the order or operations are, once i have these my script is finished
all i will do i create library's for the different renders like MR, vray , maxwell ect
this will let user select which is correct lib and it will load