OTOY Forums

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.

Hi. Open the Render Passes tab on the OctaneRender Viewport and select the passes you want.

Paul

face_off wrote:Hi. Open the Render Passes tab on the OctaneRender Viewport and select the passes you want.

Paul

Thanks Paul - I apparently developed an unconscious blindness to the right-side tabs You apparently exposed the same options as for the standalone, which is great.

It was in reading the Poser documentation that the hint about Render Passes reminded me to check the Daz plugin UI again . . . and there it was! Sorry about the dumb question.

A "Render Passes" test just created the multi-layer EXR I hoped for and "Render Layers" seems to be the key to getting an almost-equivalent to Daz Iray's "canvas" approach where a subset of objects can be included in a given layer+pass combination.

Admittedly, the Daz plugin documentation seems a bit sparse in these areas, so perhaps they should just reference the standalone documentation for more details?