Originally posted by hammer.horror render passes are great but you will have to have an understanding of compositing to get the most of them. Just to be straight on this. do you mean render passes as in spec/shadow/reflection/ambient etc, or passes as in everything rendered at once just at , well, actually i guess a combination of both would work wouldnt it. as far as compositing. I only use photoshop. No toxic or any of those other plug "channel 'x' into channel'y' " type ones. Im happy playing about with blending modes and opacity levels and whatnot. My main idea I guess is to just try and get a bunch of renders together that i can clone tool out of one and into another, but I doubt thats what you mean by compositing skills! I watched a digital tutors render layers tut last night,, but it was maya 2009, using tokens, and contribution maps (which looked like just what i might need), and render 'passes' of seperate render 'layers'. But as ive got 2008 it wasnt really that helpful.