{"id":2028,"date":"2015-10-13T00:37:06","date_gmt":"2015-10-13T05:37:06","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.pivisuals.com\/news\/?p=2028"},"modified":"2015-10-13T00:37:06","modified_gmt":"2015-10-13T05:37:06","slug":"multi-pass-rendering-in-lightwave-and-after-effects","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.pivisuals.com\/news\/2015\/10\/multi-pass-rendering-in-lightwave-and-after-effects\/","title":{"rendered":"Multi-Pass Rendering In Lightwave (and After Effects)"},"content":{"rendered":"

After realizing Ambient Occlusion\/ Global Illumination wasn’t going to cut it for animations<\/a>, 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.<\/p>\n

My next step was\u00c2\u00a0determining if Multi-Pass Rendering does improve the final render, thus justifying the additional\u00c2\u00a0work. 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.<\/p>\n

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:<\/p>\n

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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:<\/p>\n