Composite render elements in Photoshop

- [Instructor] The last thing we are going to explore in V-ray is the render element. The render elements provide us the opportunity to have more control over different elements within a render and we're going to see that in Adobe Photoshop once we have the render elements being rendered out. So, in my rendering set up dialogue box under the render elements I'm going to add a couple of the render elements by clicking on the add button over here. Under the render elements I am going to choose the VRayDenoiser will control the global illumination, the VRayLighting, and then I will scroll down to look for the VRayReflection. Now there is also this raw reflection but I am going to use simple reflection then refraction. Scroll down and then finally I will choose VRayShadows and VRaySpecular and hit okay. So these are different render passes we're going to get and then composite them in V-Ray. Once I am ready with all of these and the V-Ray is then already set up with GI and all those settings that we did earlier and also I'm working in my House_Int_Full.max file which was the initial file with all the lighting and camera set up. I'm going to hit render. The camera is VRayCam003 and then I will hit render to render out my scene. Now one thing I have done already is that I have gone ahead and rendered out my scene. So, during the rendering process you can check all of those different rendering elements that you just set up. So, this is the RGB pass. I can see the VrayGlobalIlumination, I can see the VRayLighting, I can see the refractions, the specular, all of them when the are in rendering process. I'm going to go ahead and stop this rendering for now because I've already rendered and saved these out. So if you have access to the exercise files you can find different sets of renders that I have provided in V-Ray renders folder where you can find all of these passes in different folders. Also, I going to show you another good thing about the V-Ray history is that previously when I had saved my render, I'm going to access that, and you will be surprised that V-Ray also saves all the render elements with the render. So, I have my RGB, global illumination, and VRayLighting. Everything being saved in order to compare with the next render pass that I take with all these render elements. Now if I'm going to save this by pressing this button It will only save this RGB color or whichever channel is currently active. I'm going to go back to RGB or any channel and I want to save all of them at once, so all I have to do is left-click, hold my mouse button, and then I can choose this double floppy icon and it's going to save all the channels. If I give it a name and then I save it out as png or whatever format I want to go with and just by hitting the save button will save all these channels at once. Since I have already saved these out I'm going into jump to Adobe Photoshop now. Inside Photoshop I have brought all of these renders. The first one is the global illumination on top of that I have my VRayLighting and then I have reflections, then I have refraction, and then I have my shadows. For now, I will turn off my shadows. I will select all these passes and then I will change the type to Linear Dodge (Add). Now this is the final render that I got here with the lighting and I have actually combined all those passes to achieve exactly the same result but there is one thing I can do and it's having control on individual elements such as I can adjust the lighting without effecting the reflections or the shadows. So, I will select the VRayLighting pass and then apply any of these filters such as levels or curves or color balance. So if I go ahead with color balance hold alt and then link it with the VRayLighting because I just want to color balance only the lighting lay not the other layers. Then I can play along with the lighting pass. Now notice it's going to effect only the lighting and the other passes will stay there. The shadows won't be effected. So for example, if I want to have slightly yellowish render I can just make it yellow and then I can throw the curves adjustment and then play around with the curves and as you can see curve is affecting only the lighting here it's not effecting the reflections at all. Now, I'm going to go with the reflections here which are currently very dark. I'm just going to turn these to off for now and then I will just simply bring down the opacity. Now this is one way to control the reflection. Now it's reducing the reflections all over the scene but I want to control the reflections here on the floor only. So what I can do is I can just simply apply a mask on top of it and then I can start erasing the reflections and also by reducing the opacity. So I will press one on my keyboard to bring the opacity to ten and then start erasing the reflections from the portions that I want to be less reflective. So the opacity is less like ten and I will start reducing the reflections. I find this reflection being very hard so I can just make it subtle by removing some reflections from here, here, and on the roof as well. Now, let me increase the opacity to 50 by pressing five so we can see a hue change by removing the reflections. Not this saves us a lot of time than suppose if we had taken this render in 30 minutes and then we had figured out that there was a lot of reflection on this floor. Then we would probably have taken a separate render once again for 30 minutes we would have to wait, but with the render elements I can just go ahead and play around with different layers. The final one is the VRayShadows. I'm going to make it active and then I'm going to change this one to Subtract and I will reduce the opacity very low. Now I want to again control this in specific areas so I'm going to apply the masking on top of that and then invert the mask by pressing control backspace, and let's just paint that on top of the areas where we want shadow. So I will choose my brush tool by pressing B and again I will bring my opacity down to ten and start adding shadows in different places. If that is not visible I will slightly increase it to 40 so I can see the shadows. I can add some shadows over here. Probably some shadows here and below these chairs and maybe some shadows here in the sofas and around these TV and other places such as this shelf should have some shadows. So now I have full control over different elements of this render using the render elements and different passes and compositing them inside Photoshop. Now next, we are going to explore another off land render And it's the autorenderer inside 3D Studio Max.