[Bf-funboard] RFC-Multipass Rendering

[Luke Wenke]

Hi,
I'm not sure if it is optional or not, but I think it should be optional.
(So the user can just render the regular way without saving the passes to
separate files)
> 4...The files are saved with
> a single letter "B,D,S,R,K" (K from the print world meaning "black" for
> shadows, open to suggestions here... is there a standard out there?),
> frame number, then the extension.
Shadows can be red or blue, etc, so "K" isn't a very good abbreviation. I
think it should be "Shad", "Spec", "Refl", etc, since they're
self-explanatory. The names could be inserted between the rendered file name
and the number. e.g. RenderFile_Shad0001_0100.avi or
RenderFile0001_0100-Shad.avi. The reason for that is because people might
have two animations that have the same animation range which they want to
combine, also it makes sure that when sorted alphabetically, the pass files
are shown near the other render files (since they begin with the same name).

> Special passes created by the user, such as Ambient Occlusion (AO),
> Fresnel, and Depth (z-buffer) passes can then be inserted by the user
> as desired, and of course all the various passes' files are in the
> saved directory for use in other programs if desired.
The problem is though that the z-buffer is probably 16 or 24 (or 32) bit,
though it is easiest to visualize as an 8-bit greyscale image. And the
z-buffer mightn't have a uniform scale (e.g. 0 to 65535) - it might have
floating point numbers or something.
- Luke.