October 13, 2015 : Multi-Pass Rendering In Lightwave (and After Effects)
After realizing Ambient Occlusion/ Global Illumination wasn’t going to cut it for animations, I turned to Multi-Pass Rendering with area lights. The idea of using some form of GI appealed to me because I wanted to composite a shadow layer on top of the main render. While this would require an extra step in my pipeline, I believe the additional control would result in an improved final render.
My next step was determining if Multi-Pass Rendering does improve the final render, thus justifying the additional work. While testing out AO, I noticed the shadow pixelation/ flickering was less noticeable for the darker gray uniform of the Walrus object. To make sure the object wasn’t inherently hiding any problems, I brightened the object’s surfaces – making it lighter and more colorful. I used these surfaces for the Multi-Pass Renders.
After making an Area-Lights-Only render, I used the Compositing Buffer Export in Lightwave to create multiple buffer renders. These were imported into After Effects to composite the final render. I then spent some trial-and-error time tweaking the Opacity and Blending Modes for the various buffers. Below is a shot of the Layer Panel, showing the settings I ended on:
Once I got things to look pretty decent, I made a video doing a side-by-side comparison between the Area-Lights-Only and Multi-Pass Renders:
For easier viewing, below is a single frame of the video:
The Multi-Pass Render is definitely more dynamic. I want to get a better handle on the Opacity and Blending Mode settings for each render pass, but I am convinced that the Multi-Pass Render provides the additional control and improved render quality I was targeting.
posted by Pi Visuals at 12:37 am
Tags: After Effects , Lightwave