Render Passes Render out in Black

[ESpence]

Hi Guys,

Can anyone tell me why is it that when i select render passes such as specular and any others from the Render Manager, they all render out to black?
this just started happening and I am lost on this problem.

thank you

[thiago]

wait, you are talking about passes or channels?

if you make a new scene, put a sphere, make it reflective, put and enviroment shader and render, how your reflection channel lools like?

So usually channels will not give you very controllable results... they are basically outputting part of the render calculation to a specific file.
Example you have a reflection, so you can output this reflection into a channel (which is a rendered file).

A pass is a more dedicated and controllable render set.

The best workflow is to work with passes and use channels for very specific things, because it will give you much more control over each pass channel.

[ESpence]

Hi there, do you mean when you go to the Render Manager and you select the different passes from the pass panel, those are all channels? thats where i select the Specular pass and all the other pass only to have render as black.

[thiago]

ok a pass is Render>pass|edit>new pass.

Thats a pass, it will show up in the explorer and rendermaneger etc.
Open explorer 8, set it to passes (press P with the mouse over the explorer window).
there's your passes.

Channels show up in the rendermanager under "Render Channels Ouput", amd it will just pipe specific pixels of your rendering calculation, to specific files.

Have this two guys It's not a bad thing at all, you can do a lot with passes + channels, see this for passes introduction: http://www.softimage.com/products/xsi/videos.aspx?video_id=27


passes will let you setup your entire scene.
I mean change materials, light visibility, objects visibility.. every single thing you can imagine.

So you should read a bit about it because it's quite complex...
watch this video http://www.vast.ws/resources/xsi/tutorials/Rendering/movies/7_0.html
its a little old so its a bit different from rendermanger and channels workflow of XSI 6... but it's very basic.. so it would help you a lot.

watch all the Render Passes Explained in here
http://www.vast.ws/resources/xsi/tutorials/tutorials.html

good information in the manual as always: http://softimage.wiki.avid.com/xsidocs/introrender_UsefulToolsforRendering.htm#Xfh428489


So to simplify... A pass says how you'll render your scene... and channel is a layer created from this render.

You can have as many passes you want, and output many different channelsof this.. including make your custom channel, as shown in the first link I put in this post.

too complicated? :P

[ESpence]

This helped a lot thank you. It turns out that I wanted to do render channels and not passes so I was confusing everyone. Sorry about that and thanks again.