[RESOLVED] What can I do with all the different render layers?

[mattjgerard]

Hey all, I'm just trying to poke into more tweaking and making my product renders look even better. I've just been rendering with the clown layer to PSD's, but what is the purpose of the all the other render layers? Mostly the post PS work I do is bumping LED color saturations and adding glows/blurs to parts. Any good explanations of what exactly the layers are telling me and more importantly how I can use them to do post work?

Cheers!

[theAVator]

I had the same question and ended up googling some stuff and came across this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wrsvFKNgxgU  And after I recovered from my brain aneurysm, I went "yeah, I'm just gonna keep doing what I've been doing".  lol

Maybe not so helpful, but that video is good to show all the passes being used for different things in Photoshop.

[Chad Holton]

I like to use the ambient occlusion pass with renderings to adjust the shadows a little more. Sometimes I even render the main renderings without shadows to speed things up and add in the shadow with the AO pass. May not work with every case but can end up with cleaner shadows faster. Can help speed things up when rendering out animations too. I have a good example I'll post when I get back to my machine.

[Chad Holton]

This was done over a year ago but would still be rendering if I didn't use passes.  The customer was after a very specific look, so I used a combination of different renderings/passes to get what they were after. I also like to create my own specular pass, which is basically a shiny black plastic, to get a particular feel or to bypass long rendering times.

https://youtu.be/afDnRhnZc7I

[NM-92]

In my particular case (i LOVE doing post work) i began to use them, like a LOT. Every render pass has it's own benefits if you begin setting them up above your main render layer. The diffuse pass lets you recover any color data lost or atenuated with lighting by boosting the original colours you've selected. Reflection and AO passes are a must to bump those shadows/reflections. You just have to play with the layer blending mode in PS and then you adjust the layer's opacity to set how much do you want to affect the render. All this lets you tweak and enhance your image in a nearly 100% non destructible method and making changes easily. It takes a bit more time, yes, but it's worth it imo. 

[mattjgerard]

The diffuse pass lets you recover any color data lost or atenuated with lighting by boosting the original colours you've selected.

This is what I'm looking for, off to test as soon as I get my 500 image spreadsheet done

[NM-92]

The diffuse pass lets you recover any color data lost or atenuated with lighting by boosting the original colours you've selected.

This is what I'm looking for, off to test as soon as I get my 500 image spreadsheet done

It's definitely worth to try it. You just have to nail the perfect balance between layer blending mode and opacity to pump those colours in. A great help to avoid rendering the whole scene again.

[INNEO_MWo]

Thank you for this interesting entry!
As Nico pointed, the passes has its benefits. Most of them are very helpful. Others can be replicated with changing the material type. For example, the occlusion pass can be very grainy sometimes. So you can add a model set and change the material of all parts (besides the light sources) to a flat material with the occlusion texture (50% grey in un-occluded and a dark color in occluded) in the diffuse channel - and - of course no ground shadows from the environment. (you can use it quiet handy with studios).
So you can control the occlusion and use this in post.

Attached you'll find my example scene.


Cheers
Marco

[Justin A]

Due inactivity this thread will be closed.  If you are still having the same issue please open an new thread or you can contact us direct at [email protected]

Thank you