Camby1298

Hey all

Can any one point me to a good read or guide me through for Render passing different objects (not shadows or AO or Z Depth but actually geometry) on different layers and having MR merge them 2gether? I have a massive scene and cant get it to render in one shot (even with adjusting BSP and Large BSP settings).

And where can I find the BSP dialog box to show me size/depth of nodes and leafs my scene is using.

Tried reading through the MR reference book but wasnt much help.

Thanks in advance.

WAcky

I'm about to try the whole render passes thing on my next piece and found this tutorial a good read.

Its written for scanline but the same theory should apply in your comp stages.

http://www.aecbytes.com/tipsandtrick...ositing3D.html

Camby1298

Thanks James

But not exactly what I was looking for. Im trying to find documentation strictly for the Render Passes funtion in MR. Where its geometry that I render in different passes and use MR Merge Shader to combine them.

siliconbauhaus

There was some indepth stuff on that in either the rendering with mental ray or arch vis with mental ray books but I can't remember which one.

WAcky

Ah ok.

The book that contains some information on this is "realistic architectural Visualization with 3ds max and mental ray" but i think its methods are now outdated.

Take a look at the lens effect called "subset of scene". This is a video by Jeff Patton that i am yet to look at: http://jeffpatton.net/Tips/alpha_mask/alpha_mask.html

You have to unhide this shader and there is more reading somewhere on http://www.mentalraytips.blogspot.com/

What this basically does is only render out certain objects incase you wanted to change something in a scene and only render out your changes. I guess this could work for render passes but I haven't tried it.


In terms of the render passes for mental ray the basic workflow is to make selection sets based on your different passes. Select the sets you dont want rendered and go object properties > and ucheck 'visible to camera'. This means even though these objects wont render they will still create reflections and shadows on other objects.

Next go to your render dialogue > processing > then click ... next to the greyed out save button. Save your first pass and check the save and merge buttons. Now render your scene. You have just created that first pass. Once thats done click the add button and load the pass you just saved. Now you need to save the next pass under a different name and unhide and the appropirated objects that need to rendered while not forgetting to rehide the objects that you rendered in the previous pass, re-render, add, repeat.

I hope this is clear enough to understand. Sorry :P

Camby1298

Thanks Mate, Thats exactly wot I was looking 4

mikedeerf

Another option, that works great for me, is Master Zap's splitrender script
http://mentalraytips.blogspot.com/20...-in-max-9.html

Camby1298

Thanks Mike,

Tho n order for that script to work you gotta hav ur FG map all sorted, and my scene takes up more RAM than I hav available.

Zap's script is great if ur workin on an image that is huge n resolution

The redner Passes works like a charm! Highly recommended if ya hardware aint top notch.