anyway, Thanks once again for the insight and tutorials.

Good luck guys!

…we mostly use Fusion for our projects.

I was wondering whether your AO passes take a long time to render and if so, whether you have ever considered baking the AO into the texture or creating one huge AO texture for the AO pass. I tried to find such a solution but I always bumped into UV issues. Any thoughts on the matter?
Reza

Thanks for your kind words Reza, the actual AO doesn’t take too long really, but I have found the pre-calc part does take a while (I can’t say at this point if rendering more than 1 frame in one go, it will do that slow pre-comp every frame). About the baking though, have you thought about camera mapping? I have been thinking about that myself for the street scene.
In the end it might not really matter if I just let shots render away while I’m at work during the week :). But perhaps camera mapping the AO only might be a good idea. Certainly better than baking in my experience.
Lucas talked a bit about it in one of his podcasts, that might be handy.

Nice post! I’m putting the finishing touches on the next podcast and one of the things it talks about are those RGB matte passes. I’ll definitely link to this when its up. The one burning question I have is the depth pass. It sounds like you’re saying that you get better results when doing DOF with a higher res image? How does that work exactly? Does it just handle the edges better?

It depends a lot on the shot, I think with the one with Edgar in the street it has been quite a big transition between focus and out of focus so its been tricky.
I basically did what was is explained in the Lenscare Manual, which is rendering the depth 2x (or more infact) then resizing the comp to match that, then DOF, then resize back down and the edges should match a bit better.

If you use dof with a anti-aliased depth pass all the edges that have been smoothed grey between white and black, and so for those wee pixels it will be set at the wrong distance.

I was wondering whether your AO passes take a long time to render and if so, whether you have ever considered baking the AO into the texture or creating one huge AO texture for the AO pass. I tried to find such a solution but I always bumped into UV issues. Any thoughts on the matter?

Good luck with the rest of the project which is turning out to be a feast for the eyes.

Reza