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Compositing shadows and mattes from V-Ray

Shadows help place the CG elements in the world. Literally grounding it in reality. Rendering them is easy, but for more control we need to separate the shadow layer for compositing. Creating them in 3dsMax isn’t hard and here’s how to setup V-Ray to separate the necessary passes.

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Outline of our linear workflow

This is the outline of our linear workflow. It works for both Fusion and Nuke.Viewing Linear workflows

The Composite

Setting up our linear workflow is relatively straight forward.

The key points are:-

  1. Inputs and outputs are 10 bit dpx files.
  2. the log to linear operation should match the camera profile ( Cineon, s-Log, Arri log c, etc )
  3. the log to linear operation on the input is inverted for the linear to log operation on the output.
  4. Composite with a floating point colour depth.

The Display

There are two methods for viewing the composite.

  1. No LUT file.  Without a grading LUT the only option is to apply a simple gamma to view the composite.
  2. LUT files. If a Colourist is involved then the linear image MUST be converted to a log plate before the LUT file is applied.

Further reading

  1. Simple Log to Lin workflow in Fusion
  2. Using Stacked LUTs in Fusion

Merge Tool Maths

This is a brief breakdown of the maths behind Fusion’s Merge Tool.

The Operator modes are well documented. But, I’ve done some digging around to uncover the maths behind the Apply mode, Alpha Gain and Burn In.

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