OUDF504: Render Layers

On one of the studio sessions I learnt l or 2 things about render layers. Being used to rendering on a single layer I've never really had any control over the final look of my render. I learnt that if you render in layers you gain control over the shadows, reflections, and occlusion when the final render is transferred to After effects.

  

There are a few stages to go through to achieve this. We begin by rendering the colour pass for the texture of the specified geometry, in this instance it is the cube and the lamp (figure 1).

figure 1

With all the relevant assets selected we create a new layer for the shadow pass, the cube and the mat on the surface are the only assets that need to stay selected not the lamp. the lamp's shadow is already created in the real world object therefore it is not needed in the shadow pass. (figure 2)

figure 2

The place mat is a reflective surface therefore creating a reflection pass is essential, this is done by firstly selecting the cube, the lights and the place mat > creating a new render layer > name it reflection pass > create blinn > turn reflectivity to 1.000 > assign to object > Render. The reflection will show but the cube will also show it's colour pass, we only need the reflection. To fix this all that is needed is to go to the attributes of the cube and turn off primary visibility. Our final render should look like (figure 3)

figure 3

finally to create an occlusion  all we need to do is again select the cube, the place mat and this time the table > we then need to create a new render layer and call it 'occlusionPass' > this already has a pre-set and under its attribute editor we choose occlusion. The outcome should look like (figure 4)