Robo Turntable

Developing the final look of my thesis.

I learned a lot about mental ray render layers and their limitations by doing this turntable.

"Diffuse Material Color" and "Direct Irradiance" passes do not seem to respect transparency/cut out opacity maps.  I was really disappointed in this discovery as I'm using transparency maps for several assets and this just really limits my options. In hindsight it's clear why they don't respect transparency but it'd be nice if they did! It's pretty easy to generate a custom pass for Diffuse Material Color that respects transparency but it's impractical to be creating custom color passes for every shot in my thesis. Having Diffuse Material Color separate allows for an excellent method of color grading in post because it's really easy to see your base colors.

Instead I ended up using "Diffuse No Shadow" and "Shadow" passes to comp my beauty in nuke. It still gives me some control having the shadows separate from their respective lights but not as much as I'd like. When using these two passes it's important that you use the "Specular No Shadow" pass otherwise you will be negating shadows from your specularity twice(once in your shadow pass and once in your specular pass).