Hello again dear forum.

I need to be able to render passes in mental ray in such a way that a custom background image is present in all or in some passes. Is this possible?

Thank you!

EoDEo

Ideas drift like petals on the wind. You have only to lift your face to the breeze.

What passes are you rendering? I’d think if you’re compositing passes you would want the background as a separate layer…

3ds Max 2009 SP1, 2010 SP1
Maya 2012
Windows 7 Professional 64-bit
Dual Intel Xeon E5520, 6 GB Ram
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 460 OC

I agree… and normally that’s how I’d do things, but a friend of mine wants to do composting in Photoshop, and apparently brazil renderer, by splutterfish can do this easily and makes composting various layers easy in PS.

So… any ideas how, or even if mental ray can do this?

EoDEo

Ideas drift like petals on the wind. You have only to lift your face to the breeze.

Can you give some examples of the passes you need and the background for each?

3ds Max 2009 SP1, 2010 SP1
Maya 2012
Windows 7 Professional 64-bit
Dual Intel Xeon E5520, 6 GB Ram
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 460 OC

All the regular passes- diffuse, AO, specular, shadow…

EoDEo

Ideas drift like petals on the wind. You have only to lift your face to the breeze.

I don’t get why you need a background in those. Can you explain what custom background you need in each?

3ds Max 2009 SP1, 2010 SP1
Maya 2012
Windows 7 Professional 64-bit
Dual Intel Xeon E5520, 6 GB Ram
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 460 OC

I cant explain, as I dont understand it either. It seams very counter intuitive to me. Still, my friend needs it, and brazil render has it. As I’m the one saying that mental ray is better, the ball is kinda in my court to prove it… I dont know of a way to solve this, but I was hoping someone does.

EoDEo

Ideas drift like petals on the wind. You have only to lift your face to the breeze.

From the Brazil help file, in the render pass settings section:

The background override only effects the image background, but has no effect on the reflected or refracted environment, in most cases. The exception being when rendering a Reflection / Refraction pass with the minimum ray depth visibility set higher than 1. The background will then be overriden for all ray levels below this threshold. Most render passes are rendered over black, white, or occasionally 50% gray, so these are provided as standard options for convenience. For non-standard backgrounds, a custom color is also provided.

If this is what your friend means, I’m not familiar with a way to change the render pass background color. Maybe someone else might. I don’t see it as much of an advantage anyway..

3ds Max 2009 SP1, 2010 SP1
Maya 2012
Windows 7 Professional 64-bit
Dual Intel Xeon E5520, 6 GB Ram
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 460 OC