Specialized passes: Material ID, Object ID and UV Pass

i think you left out to specify where i can see the result of a render pass because is not default when you preview render, for that you have to go (in the preview render window) to file / load render pass,

excellent，this tut is just what I want.

awesome, simply awsome. Thanks, I can go to sleep now.

It worked on my side
try this file
rapidshare.com/files/204829456/custom_Pass.rar.html

Hmm ever tried this with mia X shaders?
My renders keep crashing. I tried material ID and depth ID. I connected mias resault but no way to render in Maya 2009 (64bit).
Any idea?

Btw, here is a nice plug-in to do Texture remapping... works with Combustion :)
www.revisionfx.com/products/remap/

if you want to have viewport texture LOD, this might work, but you will need to write a script to "swap" those textures.

As for batch rendering, this functionality is already there. it is call Elliptical Filtering for mental ray and "auto convert to optimized textures".

Basically mental ray for Maya has a user pref that allows to automatically convert all referenced textures into a pyramidal, tile based memory map format, which is being used by mental ray at render time (for example sourceimages/foo.tga, would create a sourceimages/cache/foo.tga.map). during rendering, elliptical filtering will pick the right texture resolution in the optimized texture map and automatically do LOD. Also since the file format is optimized for mental ray, it will only load the tiles required for a given resolution, reducing greatly File I/O and memory consumption.

@Braden99

you can use an expression for this. basically, if in batch mode, use globeMap10k.jpg else use globeMap1k.jpg.

the mel to find out if you are in batch rendering mode is : about -b

Awesome, would have never found out about this rendering style. Very handy indeed for compositing.
In an unrelated question, is it possible to have a shader network that allows an artist to have different textures rendered than in the viewport? Say I have a shader network with a 16k colour channel, 8k spec and transparency, 10k displacement, and 10k normal (this was a world globe). Is it possible to set up a shader network that will display a 2k colour proxy and 2k transparency in the viewport? Obviously Maya can't display the high-resolution textures. I don't want to create a proxy object with proxy textures, because that complicates the scene more (I have already got custom connections/scripts, to connect camera pre-scale to displacement alpha gain and to normal alpha gain + other custom connections to blend between different colour maps. Forget all the details, my question is, is it possible to set up a simple shader with two colour inputs, one to use at render time, and one to use in the viewport?

is there any tutorial about the re-texture surfaces during compositing stage?

i think it is must be very interesting