OTOY Forums

Hello.

I'm on the next stage of exploring Octane and have arrived at render passes. Here's a question. Is it possible to have a "normal" pass (containing) all the objects and the shadow pass in one rendering like in the image below? I know it's possible to use render layers, but that would mean twice the render time. And as I usually render very high res images (8K+) this is a significant amount of time. Thanks for any advice.

Hi,

Andreas_Resch wrote:Is it possible to have a "normal" pass (containing) all the objects and the shadow pass in one rendering like in the image below?

That's what render-layers are for. There isn't any single AOV in any renderer that is a substitute to render-layers.

Andreas_Resch wrote:I know it's possible to use render layers, but that would mean twice the render time.

Wherever you read that, that's an erroneous information, or misinterpreted/misunderstood?

If you are new to Octane, I would strongly recommend to consult some of these pages, such as "Kernel Settings" and any other one that may be helpful to you.

While I personally don't recommend it, multi-layer EXR is possibly what you meant to imply, AOVs (or "passes") into a single file. Disadvantages are essentially that all-in-one-single-file impacts on "performance", and having them separately provides higher flexibility and control.

Thanks for the reply.

In Cycles it is possible to get those two passed in one render run. That's why I asked.

About render layers. From what I understood, the render process starts from scratch for each render layer. If there's a way to get multiple render layer in one render run, that's great. I'll look for more information about that.

And no - I was not talking about single-file vs. multiple files. I'm fine with multiple files. Used them in Cycles as well.

Andreas_Resch wrote:In Cycles it is possible to get those two passed in one render run.

Indeed, I don't recall that being possible in Octane. It could, but through workarounds, e.g. AOVs (which don't require a "re-rendering per AOV") with cryptomatte, which is what I was actually referring to, that I mistaken with render layers.

In Cycles it is possible to get those two passed in one render run. That's why I asked.

How do you do this?

AFAIK, you need to render the scene twice in Cycles as well, using view layers.

Which can be done in Octane as well.

It's possible in one render run. If the "Shadow Catcher" is activated as a render pass, the objects and the shadow catcher are separated like this. Here a plane is below the sphere and it's marked as a shadow catcher in the object settings.



But I guess I can come to a similar result if I extract the objects from the combined layer with an object mask.

Andreas_Resch wrote:But I guess I can come to a similar result if I extract the objects from the combined layer with an object mask.

Indeed, that's what I was referring to from my previous reply (AOVs/Cryptomatte).

Andreas_Resch wrote:It's possible in one render run. If the "Shadow Catcher" is activated as a render pass, the objects and the shadow catcher are separated like this. Here a plane is below the sphere and it's marked as a shadow catcher in the object settings.

RenderPasses_02.jpg

But I guess I can come to a similar result if I extract the objects from the combined layer with an object mask.

In your previous example the shadow were not masked by the obejct, that's what I was thinking you needed.

Yeah. That's not possible in Blender either. Not in one run. But I think I will go for extracting the objects from the combined pass. I hope I don't get any issues around the corners.

This might be useful but not exactly what you wanted.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bEgjnyNwOSg