Hi,
I've been trying out Daz Iray's exposure of "canvas" render outputs to create beauty, light group, environment, depth, etc. passes in a single button click - nicely allowing selection of specific objects to be included in each "canvas"-based pass. Everything is output as .exr files and can be easily composited in a capable graphics program (I still use Photoshop CS6).
The closest thing I have used in our Daz Octane plugin is the use of Info Channel, where similar (and more) renders can be made manually by:
1. Selecting Info Channel as the kernel
2. Turning on Alpha channel
3. Selecting a "Type" of pass
4. Manually running the render pass
5. Manually saving the render as a (linear) EXR
6. (repeating steps 3-5 until all passes are done)
It's somewhat tedious and takes awhile to sit around and run for larger scenes, but not horrible I suppose.
Unlike Daz objects being associated with Iray canvasses such that I can even have separate light group outputs per emissive surface, that doesn't seem possible with the Daz Octane plugin's Light groups. Having the ability to render a pass with only a subset of objects in that pass also makes for a variety of options when alpha fills in for the missing objects in a given pass - again, something I can't seem to do in Daz Octane.
As a renderer, I greatly prefer Octane over Iray for its materials editing, performance and quality of outputs, though.
So, I guess my question becomes: are compositing options for Daz Octane outputs as limited as I am making them out to be, here? Might there be other options that I am missing?
The only other option of which I know is exporting the entire scene to .OCS and rendering multiple passes in Octane Standalone.