i was rendering iron man this week. and it got to complicated. i always use ambient occlusion (AO). but if you use AO with raytraced materials then render times get to long. now if you add a complicated mesh plus raytraced shadows and you have problems.
so i decided to render AO as a seperate pass . i would then in photoshop multiply it with the original render. you can not do subtle glows in poser so i also like to render a ''glow'' pass. since i already had so many passes i decided to render almost everything as a seperate pass as an experiment. they do this on movies. they render passes so that they can change everything in real-time.
so the passes are : color,light,AO,matte,specular ,glow

Are you going to say more? This is a little bit like announcing you had breakfast and are now reading the newspaper. Rendo is not Twitter. (for the humor impaired, ice-boy and I are good friends and I am pulling his leg)

Do you have a conclusion, or advice or something about the process?

wanted to show that its possible to the people who dont know this. and since a lot of people dont even know how to use shadows i thought this would be something new for them.  : ) 

no glow

ice-boy, did you use a Poser plug-in to do these separate passes for you?

I experimented with this method once - more out of curiosity than anything else - but I had problems re-combining the separate layers within Photoshop. No matter what sequence I put them in, or what blending mode I used for the layers, they would not come out like the complete Poser render.

So I went out for a walk and forgot all about it!

 That's pretty impressive. How were you able to separate the passes? What were the render times for each pass?

each pass is under 2 minutes.
i dont use a plug in. i change the materials

for a specular pass you just turn off diffuse on the lights. for the AO pass you turn of every light. turn on IBL and turn on AO. in the render settings turn of shadows and turn on raytracing and ''shadows only''.

A tutorial would be nice!

HINT!*

*Big hint!

I'd like to know more about this........ tell! tell!

for specular you should use the blending mode screen. for an AO pass use multiply.

Your first pass should be a color pass only, though there is shadow on it. If you blend the shadow pass with this one you will have double shadow :)

Seriously, interesting results. I like to work with passes myself, it gives you more control as you can increase or decrease an effect, play with some masks etc...

Now what about that green bg you have in your composit, it reminds me those green bg used in movies to blend cg with live shots. Is it for something like that?

And what is that figure?

You don't seriously recognize Iron Man?

Quote - You don't seriously recognize Iron Man?

LOL sure i do :)
It's just i didn't know there was a 3D figure of him ;)

things just got easier...

I'm not knocking render passes, I've yet to really take advantage of them myself, though I should really start! :)

raven if you move the camera will it look the same? 

plus your glow is a perfect sphere .

Quote -
Now what about that green bg you have in your composit, it reminds me those green bg used in movies to blend cg with live shots. Is it for something like that?

the green BG is just for demonstration.

does anyone know how poser puts everything together?

i tryed now to render first out everything together and then one with passes and put everything together in photoshop. everything looked the same only the specular didnt. the specular looked different.

raven: look at this for example. here i also have a subtle glow. look at hes leg. its not a spehere shape. the sun is so bright that it flares. like in real life. i rendered out a seperate animation of only the specular.

i tryed now to render first out everything together and then one with passes and put everything together in photoshop. everything looked the same only the specular didnt. the specular looked different.

this is how it looks if you render everything together

Couldn't it be the blend mode in Photoshop that is not the right one?

To my eye, everything is different in those two images, not just the specular. The whole image is lighter, apart from the background.

Perhaps it's to do with the fact that Poser is 'combining' everything in linear colour space and then gamma correcting, whereas in Photoshop you are combining individually gamma-corrected passes.

Possibly?

It sounds logical to me.  Lets consider the possibility that AO, specular, matte, etc with the exception of color are rendered at Gc = 1 within Poser at final render.  May explain the difference in photoshop where separate renders may not have Gc properly corrected. 

Attached Link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RJ4I8CyRJxU

You're right, in my pics the glow is a perfect sphere. However, you could always scale the sphere to elongate the glow if necessary, or I suppose, maybe even use a different shape primitive. It was just an example of getting a glow/bloom type of effect straight from Poser in a still.

Here's a (very!) quick 2 second anim to show my version. It could do with a better anim really as it doesn't really show the effect in motion very well, but it was a quick anim! :)

It's on Youtube as the anim was only an 87k .avi, but making an animated .gif bloated the filesize something rotten :(

raven when you dont see the light then the bloom needs to disappear. in your animation its visible and it looks like a ball.

the way you did it its the only way to do it only in poser. but it doesnt look realistic IMO. if people have photosohop,gimp or after effects i think its better to render a specular pass.

Quote - To my eye, everything is different in those two images, not just the specular. The whole image is lighter, apart from the background.

Perhaps it's to do with the fact that Poser is 'combining' everything in linear colour space and then gamma correcting, whereas in Photoshop you are combining individually gamma-corrected passes.

Possibly?

thats because of the specular.  the diffuse is the same. 

you might be right and its really the GC. but how to fix this now? 

i think its not GC.

Quote - thats because of the specular.  the diffuse is the same.

Respectfully, I have to disagree. Even the shadows in the two images are different.

But in any case, think about the two different processes you are using to reach a final image. Each separate pass renders with GC, then you combine these GC'd images in Photoshop. That's not the same as combining in linear colour space and applying GC to the end result.

Try to put each images in a different tab of your browser and compare them side by side, you'll see the shadow in the two images are not different. I thought the same first, but it's only the fact the two pictures are one under the other and your screen gives that impression. But it's not.

vincebagna, you are so right... my mistake. Sorry, ice-boy.

Of course (I realise now) the shadows only appear in one of the render passes, so there is no combining of gamma-corrected passes in that part of the image in the Photoshop version.

I still don't see how the sphere could be expected to look the same in the two images, given that the separate elements are combined in different colour spaces.

Out of curiosity, how do you simply "add" two layers in Photoshop? Because that's the math you need to combine diffuse + specular.

i was reading that to add a specular map in photoshop we need to use the blending mode ''screen''.
i will post screens.

i made the  Blinn eccentricity 0.25. on light 2 i turned off the specular. after the render was finished i changed the Blinn and made it wider. then i rendered out a specular pass.
so now it looks like light 2 is bigger then light 1.

passes can also be used for ground shadows. for example soft ambient shadows. this is an example of Bagginsbill. you only get AO on the ground. so if you export as TIF or png you also get transparency.

so for example we have a black and white render where only one light is on. like here. the sun light. every material is white. now in photoshop we could control the color of the light. and we could also make a matte where to use AO.

but changing every material to whtie takes a lot of time. so i was wondering could we make a script that would make every material white?
is this possible?

 There is one already. If it isn't included in Poser, then it's here in Free Stuff. Originally used to change the default flesh colour on early models to something more suitable for texture use :)

I think it's called All White or something :)

look in Freestuff... they've been around since Poser 5 at least.

VSS can do that, too. VSS can make all materials anything you want. You just put the material in a template on a control prop, assign all target materials to that template using a Rule *, and it will copy that material to every zone on the target.

i can not find the script. can someone help me find it?

thanks

Damn. I've got the freebie zip file (from Mec4D), but I can't find where I downloaded it from.

Am I allowed to post the zip file? It's got all the ReadMe/Licence stuff in it.