V-Ray Tuner 4.5: Now With Automatic Light Select RE Generator for Lights In older versions of V-Ray Tuner, I had a script that would spit out individual renders for each light, sun/sky, etc. so you could adjust the lighting in Photoshop or Nuke later. Well since Chaos Group updated the Light Select render element to include global illumination, that script is no longer efficient since the Light Select method lets you render a single frame and get all those nice separate light passes without re-rendering. So I updated V-Ray Tuner to include a script to auto-generate a Light Select render element for each light in the scene (it also prompts you to make a dome light for to host a sky as texture since that’s required as a workaround): That older script has the advantage that it works with materials with emission and mesh light materials though so I am keeping it around. Go get it. 0 notes | Permalink

Anonymous asked: Hi Dave! Don´t know why your marmoset plugin is not working for me. I run it and it doesn´t show any window even if I have exr 16 and 32 bits enabled. If I create an image it only generates one typical render file. My email: jaimevallejo90 @ gmail com Sorry for slow response. Don’t check this much. Sent you an email 0 notes | Permalink

Baking Cd Point Color to Image in Houdini 16.5 – the Easy Way In celebration of January 1, 2018 in California, let’s get baked. Baking point color in Houdini is one of those things that there are countless threads about and no clear definition of what is the best way to do this, mostly because people are using older versions of Houdini in which you have to somehow finagle VEX or attribute transfers to get the point color into a shader channel for rendering. It’s one of those “Oh Jesus, just give me a button to do this” things. Fortunately, in more recent versions of Houdini, they basically have. The principled shader has a “Use Point Color” setting that is enabled by default in the shader, and this does all the hard work of transfering Cd color point attributes to the shader. It then bakes Cd data as a texture just fine. The only prerequisite is that your object have UVs assigned. Here are the steps: With your color object with UVs done already, open the Material Palette

Make a new principled shader and drag it onto your object

In the shader’s Surface tab, set the Base Color to pure white since that will multiply over your point color and make sure that Use Point Color is enabled: Change to the out panel and create a baketexture ROP output

Select your object to bake in the UV Object1

Enable Surface Unlit Base Color (basecolor): Click Render to Disk

Enjoy your baked output: Oh and did you know that you can export meshes to .PLY and they will have the point color baked into the vertexes? Pretty cool: Unfortunately, 16.5.323 has a bug in which the PLY face normals are reversed so you have to use a Reverse SOP to flip the normals before export for PLY meshes. 3 notes | Permalink

Freebie Alert: Render Each Light Pass for Marmoset Toolbag If you followed my blog or my V-Ray Tuner script, you’ll know I made a script for V-Ray Tuner that renders each light as a separate image for compositing later. While that particular script isn’t needed anymore since Chaos Group recently added a light pass element that contains GI, I thought I’d add this functionality to Marmoset Render via a Python script. I like using Marmoset for draft renders for painting source imagery since it’s quick and the quality can be surprisingly good. So here is the script I made in action: The only thing to note is that you need to set the EXR format as the screenshot format or the script will fail. And, as you probably need the actual script to try it yourself, here is the download link. Enjoy. 1 note | Permalink