clown pass tweaking

[mattjgerard]

The clown pass option is so powerful, I think it could benefit from some tweaks

1) Exclude transparent materials.- I usually have glass windows and such in my scenes and would be nice to exclude these from the clown pass as they pretty much block everything behind the glass from being used in the clown pass.

2) Maybe specify certain materials to be included in the clown pass, might be a more robust way of dealing with #1

3) Object specific clown pass layers in PS? Allow to assign certain groups of objects as defined by the hierarchy in the scene tree to have each groups' clown pass to appear as a different layer in the rendered PSD doc? would also be another way to deal with #1.

As a non-programmer, I have no idea if these would be easy to implement or not. I can imagine the response from the coding team to be anywhere from "Ah, no problem, mate, gimme a couple hours and bob's yer uncle" all the way to "You kidding, right? Piss off."

matt

[DMerz III]

I'd imagine the 'transparent' request being a bit difficult, seeing as usually transparent materials, such as glass technically involve some level of refraction. If you simply 'turned off' the glass from the clown to reveal what is underneath,  the revealed part might not match up with your beauty pass because it is no longer 'refracted'.

In our studio, we get around this by taking a couple extra steps and A.) create custom clowns (a new scene set, set all parts manually to flat color) then we do a second manually clown where we leave the glass parts as glass and make everything behind the glass a flat color. It's not perfect, as reflections sometimes make selection in Photoshop a bit difficult, but this can be solved by turning your environment brightness to 0 (you don't need lights to get flat colors to work) and the parts behind the glass will be represented in the correct 'refracted' position.

[mattjgerard]

Those are great options, and I've used the custom clown passes with flat colors to overcome some of this when needed, so its a great option as a workaround. And like I said I have absolutely no idea on how all this happens on the back end, so If the clown pass is being created at the same time the scene is being rendered, then yes, the refraction would be an issue, but if the clown pass is being built after the image is rendered, then the render engine might be able to turn off certain objects with transparent materials applied, then kick out the clown pass. *shrug*

Armchair coding is dangerous

Cheers!
Matt

[DMerz III]

Haha, yeah I can see how this would be helpful in KS, they do have some amazing coders, so we can cross our fingers!