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What is the Light Direction pass for?

Posted: Thu Apr 18, 2019 5:09 pm
by noisyboyuk
Hi!

I'm looking into doing some relighting in Nuke and needed a normal pass. I can see several normal passes (Geometry, Tangent, Smooth and Shading), 3 of which seem to give me very similar results.

However I did also notice that there is a Light Direction pass in the beauty passes but I searched the plugin and standalone manuals and found no info (the plugin manual only seems to cover a handful of the available passes).

Is this info actually in the manual or can I find it elsewhere?

Thanks :)

Re: What is the Light Direction pass for?

Posted: Sun May 12, 2019 7:40 pm
by calus
- geometric normal pass :
Normals in world space before any material smoothing and bump/normal map.

- smooth normal pass :
Normals in world space with the Material "smooth" applied but before bump/normal map.

- shading normal pass :
Normals in world space with the Material "smooth" and bump/normal map.

- tangent normal map :
Normals in local tangent space with bump/normal map

- Light direction pass :
Estimation of the dominant direction from where most of the light is coming. (I get this one from standalone tooltip)



Also if you don't use passes but a render in info channel kernel, take care to enable "bump and normal mapping" for the Shading normal channel and the tangent normal channel

Re: What is the Light Direction pass for?

Posted: Fri May 24, 2019 10:49 am
by ceen
Hi,
is there somewhere a comprehensive guide on how to use all those special passes in compositing and for what? That would be interesting.