V-Ray Render Elements - Rendering and Compositing in Photoshop

/// V-Ray Render Elements Rendering and
Compositing in Photoshop
<<Back to Tutorials
Rendering out into elements is a fantastic way of having more control over your images and animations in
post production. There are however few tutorials that show how to do this from start to finish in an efficient
way. This tutorial will guide you through the entire process from start to finish of rendering a scene into
various passes, and how to composite it back together in Photoshop. This can also be applied to After
Effects or any other compositing program if you are creating an animation.
Please choose page
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In this tutorial we will:
Set up the scene in 3ds Max to render out various elements.
Composite them back together using photoshop.
Add specular bloom to bright areas to enhance realism.
V-Ray is a full HDRI renderer producing full high dynamic range images. This is great for post production
as it allows you to change the image exposure without losing any quality. In order to take advantage of this
we need to set up V-Ray to save floating point files.
.
So whats OpenEXR and HDRI?
Both OpenEXR and HDRI images are high dynamic range files capable of holding much more colour
information than a monitor can display. A normal 8-bit per channel jpeg or tiff contains a total of 16.7 million
colours (256*256*256). A high dynamic range file is capable of holding 32-bits per channel, allowing it to
contain a total of 4722366482869645213696 different colours! An OpenEXR file is practically the same as
an HDRI file, but it can contain many layers and compression methods. It was developed by ILM for use in-
house for their renders, and has been made freely available to all 3D users.
So why is this useful?
The amount of colour information stored in a full 32-bit floating point file allows you an incredible amount of
control in post production. For example, below is a render of a sphere with a vray light material applied with
an intensity of 100. To the left is a normal 8-bit per channel bitmap, and to the right is a 32-bits per channel
float. Notice as I reduce the exposure what happens. On the normal image the sphere simply becomes
darker. However on the right the extra light information in the exr file is telling photoshop that the light is still
very bright and it was actually a red light but was so bright it appeared white. The normal 8-bit per
channel image has lost a large amount of colour information when it was saved, however the high dynamic
range image has retained all the information.
.
Hopefully this example has shown you why rendering in hdr is so powerful. HDR Files retain a massive
amount of colour information including totally burnt out areas that appear white. The only slight issue with
rendering to hdri is the jagged edges produced due to the massive contrast in colour levels (Anti-aliasing
filters have a hard time blending between the two huge differences in contrast). There are a few
workarounds to this such as:
Adding Specular Bloom (which we will be doing later in Photoshop)
Rending at a higher resolution, and then downscaling the image. This is actually done very regularly in
CG as it gives renders that extra clarity and definition.
Use a non-sharpening anti-aliasing filter such as the Lanczos filter, rather than Catmul-Rom or
Mitchell.
Make V-Ray work as a normal 8-bit per channel renderer by clamping the output values. Under Color
Mapping tick Clamp Output and Sub-Pixel Mapping. This is a very bad solution though as it forces
V-Ray to render an 8-bits per channel image.
The workaround to this is to add specular bloom which we will be doing later.
.
Setting up the Scene
Firstly, we need to set up 3ds Max. If you do not have a scene to work on, please download the 3ds Max
file below.
tutorial_renderelements_scene.zip 840KB (Made in 3ds Max 2009 and V-ray 1.5 SP2)
With V-Ray its possible to save all render elements into a single OpenEXR File, allowing you to open one
file in photoshop with all the render elements as a separate layer.
Turn on V-Ray Frame Buffer and tick Render to V-Ray RAW Image File. Click Browse and choose a
location to save the image. Once you have chosen a save location change the file extension from .vrimg
to .exr and press save. V-Ray will save out a 32-bit floating point exr ready for us to use in Photoshop.
Some Useful Information about V-Ray:
By default V-Ray is set to save 16-bit floats rather than 32-bit floats. The exr that is saved from V-Ray is
technically a 32-bit file, but the information within it is really 16-bit. This isnt a problem as 16-bit images
save disk space while still providing ample headroom for colour corrections in post. It is possible to force V-
Ray to render out a true 32-bit float, but this is only accessible through MaxScript. I have written a script
that can do this very easily with the click of a button and it can be found on my scripts page. I would note
though that 32-bit floats are very rarely needed in post. If you want to change the levels of something to the
extent where 16-bit floats are not good enough, perhaps it is your scene that needs correcting, rather than
the rendered image.
.
Next its time to set up all the render element passes.
Go to the Render Elements tab and enable Elements Active. Click Add and select these elements:
VRay_Reflection
VRay_GlobalIllumination
VRay_Lighting
VRay_Specular
If you need an alpha channel add VRay_Alpha.
For this exercise these four are the only elements required. There are lots of other passes available, but
this exercise will just illustrate the most important ones.
PLEASE NOTE IF THE VRAY FRAME BUFFER IS ENABLED, ELEMENTS WILL APPEAR UNTICKED
AND TURNED OFF. THIS IS NORMAL AND WILL RENDER FINE.
Finally, once everything is ready press render.
.
Compositing the Elements in Photoshop
Open up the rendered OpenEXR file in Photoshop. If you do not have the file but would like to learn how to
composite the passes please download the file below.
tutorial_renderelements_exr_file.zip 1.9MB
If you can only see one layer in Photoshop called RGBA its because you need a plugin called ProEXR to
read the rest of the layers. There is a free 15 day trial for this plugin if you would like to use it which can be
found here. Adobe Photoshop can read exr files but in a very limited way, which is why this plugin is
required.
An alternative to using this plugin is to render out each frame into a seperate exr file. Simply turn off the V-
Ray frame buffer, enable all the render elements and choose a save location.
Once the plugin is loaded correctly you should be able to see all these passes. The top layer RGBA is a
pre-calculated composite of all the elements. It isnt needed so you can hide it from view by pressing the
eye to the left of it. The Specular layer is actually not needed in this example scene so can be safely
deleted. I added it to show you that it is an important element if you have any specular reflections in your
scene.
.
We are going to composite all the layers together by changing the blending mode. At the moment they are
all on normal.
As you can see some of the blending modes are greyed out. This is because the image is a full 32-bit per
channel file. If for any reason you want to use a greyed out blending mode you will have to change the file
to either 8 or 16-bit perchannel. This can be done by pressing Image>Mode>X_Bits Per Channel.
We want to add all of the elements together, so change all of the layers to Linear Dodge (Add). It doesnt
matter what order your layers are in as they are all being added to each other.
Your image should now look like the reference RGBA layer unhide it to check.
Simple huh!
.
Adding Specular Bloom
Specular bloom really helps make an image go from being good to great. Its also a really handy way of
getting rid of aliased (jagged) edges around very bright lights/reflections.
J agged edges are a problem with all HDRI renderers and not just a problem with V-Ray. Very bright areas
can be much more intense than other areas in the scene, and for this reason even on very high quality
render settings jagged edges can occur. A simple solution to this is to add specular bloom to the very
bright areas in order to blur the jagged edges into the rest of the scene. This is a very good solution as it
allows you to have full 32-bit HDRI images and it also acts the way a normal camera would in real life.
In Photoshop duplicate the VRay_Reflections layer and hide all layers except the newly duplicated one.
Adjust the Gamma by pressing Image>Adjustments>Exposure and use the Settings in the Image. Change
the opacity of the Layer to around 3%. This value is very low as the whites are so bright due to the HDRI
file. Unhide all the layers and then add a blur to the gamma adjusted reflection Layer by going to
Filter>Blur>Gaussian Blur. Adjust the blur amount to around 7 pixels.
.
Sometimes this may not produce the desired results for bloom due to the diverse amount of brightness
contained in an hdr file (some whites will bloom massively compared to others). This is entirely accurate
and the way a real life camera would behave, but this sometimes may not work for your particular scene.
To overcome this you can convert the duplicated layer to 8-bit and then apply the bloom by adjusting the
brightness/contrast values. The best way to do this would be to copy the layer into a new image in
photoshop, convert it to 8-bpc, adjust the brightness/contrast, and then drag the image back into the main
composition changing the blending mode to dodge (add) and adding a blur.
Hopefully you have managed to follow all the steps and create a composited image.
.
So why did we just do that?
Rendering out into different elements, especially hdr elements, allows us an incredible amount of post
production control.
For example say we want to change the amount of reflection after the image has rendered. Go to
Image>Adjustments>Levels and change the amount of reflection using the levels tool. This is a very simple
example of how powerful render passes can be.
.
Thank you for reading this, and I hope you will find it useful. Tim.
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