From the course: V-Ray Next: Unreal Engine Rendering

Render elements explained

From the course: V-Ray Next: Unreal Engine Rendering

Start my 1-month free trial

Render elements explained

“

- [Instructor] Oftentimes, offline render projects will rely quite heavily on post production applications in order to bring together or composite a number of elements in order to produce a finished graphic or video sequence, doing so in a way that gives directors, clients, and even artists themselves the ability to tweak and manipulate the look of a shot long after the initial render was created. In this first video for the chapter then, we're going to spend a few minutes discussing just what render elements or render channels are before moving on to take a look at how we can go about using them in V-Ray for Unreal. Simply put then, render channels give us the ability to literally split apart the various aspects of a rendered image and break it down in its component parts. Indeed, if you are already an Unreal user and have taken a look at any of the buffer visualizations available in the viewport, then you have already seen what we are talking about. In a V-Ray render though, this kind of channel based control is accomplished by a means of render elements that give us access to material properties, such diffuse color, reflections, refractions, and so on, as well as two other elements that can contribute to the look of the finished piece, such as the direct and indirect lighting. We can even generate data on the elements in V-Ray, such as masks or mattes, zed or Z-depth passes, as well as a render ID element to name just a few. Once we have rendered all of these components, we can do pretty much anything that we want with them, assuming that we have saved to floating point files for maximum flexibility that is. We can recombine or composite the elements in order to simply recreate the original render as it came out of V-Ray, or we can, at the other end of the scale, use them to sometimes drastically alter pretty much any and all aspects of the shot that we have produced. Imagine for instance, that after rendering for quite a few hours, or maybe in some cases, even days, we realize that we need to globally increase or maybe decrease the strength of reflections in our scene, as well as perhaps alter the mood of the piece by tweaking the lighting a little. Well, with the right render elements to hand, we can do all of that and much more without having to come back into our 3D package and perform more costly and time consuming offline rendering. This flexibility combined with the overall speed that the process brings to the table is what makes compositing such a valuable part of the offline production pipeline.

Contents