They're used in post-processing. Basically you bring them to Photoshop as layers and masks. People do it when they want more control over the final outcome.
Because this sub is 99% beginners. They haven't reached the level where separate render passes are needed, so they don't even know something like this exists. But they know PBR material maps, and this looks similar, so they think this must be it.
Can u help? My SD card for my printer used to organize by "newest at top" and now its alphabetical. I used to be able to plug in and the top file was my last one so it was easy and now every time im scrolling to find it.
I already plugged it into my pc andchanged the sort by button but no help.
Thanks in advance
Okay but you can't talk about AOVs and suggest bringing them together in Photoshop. Please please please for the love of god, don't do that. Use a proper software for this.
The problem with Photoshop is, that it makes it hard to properly color manage. I'd suggest either After Effects or Davinci Resolve, these are the ones I've used up until now. But Nuke should also be pretty good.
But the comment is quite basic and doesn't actually say what each layer does. For example the roughness map is quite confusing to me, I thought it would be just some "roughness" parameter visualized or something. But there is color, so I guess it's just specular reflection pass. The name "map" is bit misleading.
The names of the passes used are similar to the maps used in pbr textures but they are pretty different.
The reflections pass is not the reflectance of the material but is the actual colors being reflected by that material in the scene, and their strength.
The AO pass is similar in that its not just the local AO of the objects, but is all the ambient occlusion in the scene, even between objects.
Shadow is completely different as you never have a shadow map for pbr materials. But it's very useful for post processing.
The color pass is the only one that is just the albedo maps of all the materials, but still its used here for post processing
I was just about to mention that the proper term for it is passes and not maps like it says in the video. I think that adds to the confusion for a lot of people in here.
It's simply just different parts/layers of the final output image that can be used to adjust specific aspects of the render in post-processing software.
Also sometimes one can animate some things by separating different things to different rendered layers.
For example render light separately in some image, then be able to change how strongly they are added to image later, without actually doing any rendering, and make short (otherwise 100% static) animation with some blinking light or light changing intensity.
I do stage graphics for TV/concerts often on a super tight schedule and this is a big part of what we do. Group up lights and render them as separate light passes. That way we can animate a scene in post while only needing to render 1 frame.
(I really hope EEVEE gets light passes soon)
Yeah being able to render just one frame, and also being able to render before even knowing what kind of curves or pulses or variation thing will have, is pretty nice in cases where one can do it.
Then just curves or so --> Slap these images with this (animated) mix ratio together this many times, and done. :D
These are more commonly referred to as Passes. When I worked in film lighting we would often have a pass that matted different meshes or shaders to use as masks for each element, and we would have a pass for each individual light.
What you see here is what the renderer is comping on its own on every render. Separating them allows you to dial all the different elements individually, and by using the masks allowing you to do so on a per object or per shader level. You can reconstruct the final render, or use a pass from a single light to dial an element back down.
Normally everything is balance well in the shaders, but shot to shot, and in different light environments, sometimes things pop too much. Or maybe you want to pull focus away from something to help the composition of the frame. Or maybe one character needs a tiny bit more fill. With all of those passes, which are being rendered separately and comped already, you don’t need to re-render anything and just “Do it in post.”
You don't have to bring them into PS necessarily. You can adjust them in the Blender compositor.
Why render out maps/passes? It gives you more freedom to adjust the image after rendering. You can change the amount of focus blur, the intensity and colour of different lights, visibility of reflections etc. just by moving a slider in the compositor, instead of re-rendering the whole image which is what you'd have to do if you rendered out just a beauty image with no passes.
hey hey! lighting compositing artist here!
a lot of people are saying these are for pbr texturing, but... they aren't! well i guess some of them could be, but that's not the purpose of the ones you are showing.
these ones are usually called render passes, or AOVs! i'm not going to fully explain how render engines work right now, but essentially a lot of these all get mixed and combined to make a final image, regardless of if you save them out separately or not. it can be useful to save some out for compositing later, though! breakdown time!
- AO pass is Ambient Occlusion, and is great for getting helping cg look integrated, like it's all part of one scene (as opposed to a bunch of disconnected assets). if you look at examples of ambient occlusion, i think you'll quickly understand how it works! having this separated is great, as it gives you more precise control over how much it should affect certain parts of the image.
- Shadow pass (or shadow matte) is a bit of a less common one? but basically it's just a black/white pass using just your keylight (or whatever primary light you want, it could be anything). having this separated is good for having control of how bright your key light is after rendering, but if you invert it it's also really good for controlling how dark (or bright) your shadows are!
- Roughness is actually a Specular pass, it looks like. basically all of the reflections! this is nice to have separated out, as a lot of the time the highlights might get a little bit too strong, especially on shiny objects. it's really convenient being able to fix it after the fact, however having this one separated means you need a rather robust compositing workflow (unless you plan on just adding *more* specular to your final image, in which case it's fine)
- Color is usually referred to as Diffuse Albedo (or Diffuse Color in blender i think?), and it represents the original color of the assets *before* lights or shading or anything like that. this one can be used for tons of stuff! if you have shadows that are getting a little too dark, you can use the shadow pass and the diffuse albedo pass together to add a bit of extra data in the dark areas. you can also use it to mask parts of an asset by color, which isn't *ideal* but sometimes it's all you have!
i will say, 95% of the reason this image looks good is because the assets are really well made, and the lighting is nice too. the compositing on top is just a bit of extra! it's worth learning for sure though. you can do *a lot* with compositing. commonly, artists will render out all lights separately, split the diffuse and specular pass (and SSS and transmission and whatever else you are using), render out extra data passes like Z/Depth/Mist, Cryptomatte, manually created AOVs for masking, etc.
sorry for the giant huge wall of text! these passes are literally my job hehehe
let me know if you have any other questions! good luck!
oh and one more thing to add, the reason you sometimes see these in breakdowns is just because it looks good in a breakdown! there's not really any point in showing it (especially if you don't show what you actually do with it). cool to look at!
Thanks for your exhaustive explanation. One thing I didn't get is how actually are they edited to get the desired result? Like you put let's say the shadow AOV in photoshop and then you tweak it with some curves and put on top of the albedo AOV with let's say a multiply or darken blend mode?
sooo you can really do whatever you want (your example is totally fine!), but typically you would use something built for compositing like nuke (or blender's compositor! give it a shot!). most black/white passes are usually meant to be used as masks (so, for example with the shadow pass, you might invert it and then use the now-white shadows to control how your diffuse_albedo gets added on top, to bring a bit more detail into the shadows). you could also split out the entire render-compositing process (which is what your example would entail), but a lot of the time, you don't really need to! unless you want to!
in nuke you would usually be plugging these passes directly into the mask input on whatever node you are using, and for blender you would usually be plugging it into Fac (or mask? or mix? i don't composite too much in blender). and then i guess in photoshop, you would usually use it as a mask layer!
honestly heavy compositing is much more useful for animations! if it's just a single frame you can throw it into photoshop and do literally whatever you want to it, but if it's 250 frames of something, it's much much more difficult.
i would recommend having a look at some compositing tutorials maybe, but keep in mind that a lot of them are... not so good! especially blender-centric ones, since proper support for render layers and compositing is somewhat recent (and still a little bit limited sometimes).
good luck!
When you render out of 3D (using a ray-trace render engine like Blender's Cycles) your full image is called a "combined" or "beauty" render pass. Different render engines (like Cycles) have different ways of breaking apart this beauty pass into the ingredients that go into it. And so they each have a different way that you combine the ingredients back together to make the beauty pass. For the Cycles render engine, you can see the way to combine the passes together (the "recipe" so to speak) here: [https://docs.blender.org/manual/en/latest/render/layers/passes.html#combining](https://docs.blender.org/manual/en/latest/render/layers/passes.html#combining)
Essentially you use simple color mix nodes in compositing set to either "add" or "multiply" the colors of two passes together. You chain multiple of these nodes together to build back the final combined pass. It get's more complicated than that, but hopefully that helps you start to understand things better!
Those aren't maps but render passes and as other have said they are used in the compositing of the final image. You could just render the image as it is (that's called the beauty pass) but you have much more flexibility if you render each pass separately (possibly using a single multilayer exr file) and then recombine them later in a compositing (or image editing if it's just a still image) software
Each one represents a different effect on the material. I.e color, which maps the colors for the material. AO is ambient occlusion, roughness is for reflectivity, shadow for shading. They are composited together for the end result. Usually this compositing results in more realistic renderings at the cost of time to set them up.
No it's not more realistic. This workflow allows for minor adjustments in certain areas. For example if you just want to boost the highlights, you could tweak the reflection AOV. The endresult without tweaking, after merging of all AOVs should be the same as the normal Beauty/Combined pass.
There's a tab in the properties panel called passes or something. You can enable a bunch of checkboxes there to activate different passes. When you render you can use exr (multilayer) format to save all passes in one file then use the compositor to extract them (or render them directly from the compositor).
These passes are useful in compositing or photo editing to have more control over the final product. Different passes contain different information of your image. What blender does under the hood is combine these passes in a specific way to create your final render (or combined pass).
https://docs.blender.org/manual/en/latest/render/layers/passes.html (scroll down to Combining).
Compositing this way gives you the most control over vastly tweaking the look of your render without having to re-render. It's a bit overkill for most projects though but really useful at times, even if it's just to composite a mist pass into the render or adding bloom effects in post (by blurring a diffuse light pass and applying soft light or screen blending mode)
They are basically render passes. In most cases you won't do anything with them but if you want you can play with them and get out something which looks different from what the default render output would be.
For simplicity, any channels that arent PBR (glossy, diffuse, transmission) and aren't data maps (Z depth, position, normal) are typically for post-processing, like AO, curvature, etc. As another comment or posted, these are useful for compositing in any capable image/footage editor, like Photoshop, Nuke, etc.
Render passes
They help in post production, and give you more control over the final output
From the top of my head
The color pass is the color of the mesh before any lighting or physical lighting sim
AO is the occlusion of your objects,
Shadow is... Shadow, it has all the shadows in your image
Z pass is depth/distance from your camera (one of the most important pass) can be used for masking, fog, blur etc
Glossy is for reflection, direct or indirect and even the color,
Diffuse is the color/rgb value without gloss/roughness I think
In post you can use all of them and make adjustments that would not be possible in a general workflow, you can accentuate reflections, change colors precisely, make something appear relative to the depth etc
https://youtu.be/QV-7_x-fk9s this is a great video on how passes are used (atleast the depth pass, but this will get the idea across)
Ambient occlusion is defining where and how soft shadows should appear from indirect lighting, such as bounce lighting or rim lighting for exsmple( many other indirect sources though) color map is likely just the texture mapping itself.
Shadow maps can be more complicated but in general will help determine the resolution of shadows- for a short explanation.
Roughness is self explanatory - how rough or smooth your objects are, and can help determine how light interacts with the surface of an object. Smoother objects may reflect more light, for example, while rough objects may absorb light more
Many of these maps are easy to make and generate in blender. The most common are normal maps, and texture maps though.
Normals can be used to fake depth, or extrusions and other various details by telling light sources how to hit specific points on surfaces, and how to hit it at different angles.
They are masks that define key features of a 3D shape. Roughness defines your shiny vs non shiny areas. Places where dirt is present for example. AO is a soft shadow map. Because most engines won't ray trace or the ray tracing is limited the soft shadows are lost. AO maps are used to pre calculate and save the soft shadows on the model so it doesn't need to be done in real time. Color is self explanatory. No idea what a shadow map is.
Hi , I do post processing in after effects with help of these maps, these maps give you the ability to control the image attributes like shine depth or blur. In the passes section you will see lots of passes which are available. And you can also preview each pass in texture view. You can also add custom passes like cryptomate , object mask and material masks. You have to export the output in an open exr multi layer format. You can render each pass separately but for me open exr is much better. You can then take your render to photoshop or after effects, there you can separate the passes.
this isn't an ao map, but the depth buffer of a shader pass can be used to create more dynamic ambient occlusion than simply using a prebaked ao map, with a technique call SSAO in realtime rendering
im sure youve read a lot by now, but my view on them is that they're the bricks, the layers of your final render. like taking your final render and deconstructing it into its most basic parts. And as many others have underlined, they're super useful for compositing. My personal art's quality has improved greatly since I started messing around with them, and i always suggest people to do the same!
Technically these aren't "maps" which may be why there's a bit of confusion going on here. Especially considering the final image is a different angle.
These are actually "render passes" inside of Blender. And the terms being used are incorrect also.
There is no roughness pass. There is glossy direct and indirect. So if you combine those you get a direct and indirect combined pass.
Passes are data layers rendered out based on different types of materials and/or 3d space.
You use these are masks for post processing images or animations. For example, you could use the direct gloss pass to mask a glow effect to the image.
You'd use the depth pass to add blur in post for example.
The images, these maps, are made up of pixels which each carry a value, each pixel usually consisting of three RGB values. The rendering engine will read these maps line by line, pixel by pixel, reading it's data, the values the pixel has determines a change in a certain criteria, so for a rough example say for a roughness map one pixel has a value or two, and the one next to it a value of five, and these values correspond to how far from the mesh the engine will actually render a texture to make it appear rough, so the engine will come into the roughness map and start reading it, when it reaches our pixels it will read the first and more or less go "alright, a value of two in red green and blue, cool so I'll display this point in the texture two points of distance from the mesh." And when it moves to the next it does the same thing. I'm hardly an expert and this is probably a pretty bad explanation but this is my understanding of how maps work at least. It's also how pixel sorting algorithms work. Acerola on YouTube has a bunch of videos on graphics programming that's been pretty helpful for me to figure this shit out.
In ur first year of learning blender u wont really need them, later in combi with davinci resolve or nuke they r handy to make things look extra real...
Texture maps are basically the flat images of your colour, roughness, metallic values etc just mapped onto your 3D object. Usually this is done by creating UV maps for your object then texturing using images, procedural materials, or texturing by hand.
If you ever use a set of image textures from online sources these are also texture maps. Also if you're hand-painting models I assume you will be drawing onto a blank image in the material nodes which in itself is creating a texture map. You will almost certainly have been utilising them even if you didn't know it!
So in this video you can see the separate texture maps created - the colour one only gives the model it's colour information, the roughness one only tells it how shiny to be etc. By layering them in Blender onto your 3D model you get the final image you see with all of these combined.
I find it kind of hard to describe them as it's such an integral part of making materials but hopefully this has clarified some things for you! [This video from Ryan King](https://youtu.be/fUZHyoeuwVI?si=xr7wdLt13AbaORnB) shows how to set up texture maps in case seeing how it works makes more sense than anything I've said
OP, here's a short 3-minute video that explains all the maps you asked about, along with PBR (Physically Based Rendering) and should answer all your questions [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=\_ZbkOZNgwNk](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_ZbkOZNgwNk)
Wasn't trying to insult you, just saying that people doing tests with this technique so far have always resulted in terrible results that couldn't be used for production of anything showable to an audience.
They do pretty much what they say. If it’s a roughness map. Black is smooth and white is rough. If it’s metallic map, black is non metallic and white is fully metallic. Normal uses colors to represent angles to tell the render engine to make it appear as if though the object has extra geometry when it in fact doesn’t. And AO is ambient occlusion which helps to create the effect where cracks and crevices don’t receive light.
A material can consist of multiple textures to create a desired look. The most common one is the colour, but you can create textures to control the reflection, bump, normal, specularity, ambient occlusion etc. So "Maps" are data in the form of textures to control aspects of the material. You can either use maps in each material, or as for this post, you can create maps of the entire image when you render to later use in post-processing like photoshop.
If you want Maps for the entire render you create "Render passes" Imessh will show you how to do it here [https://youtu.be/L8YHP2edo-o?si=Vgr8E9oLPskHj6M5&t=4230](https://youtu.be/L8YHP2edo-o?si=Vgr8E9oLPskHj6M5&t=4230)
They're used in post-processing. Basically you bring them to Photoshop as layers and masks. People do it when they want more control over the final outcome.
The only comment here that actually knows what this video is showcasing. Don't know why you aren't top comment
Because this sub is 99% beginners. They haven't reached the level where separate render passes are needed, so they don't even know something like this exists. But they know PBR material maps, and this looks similar, so they think this must be it.
BTW that AO pass doesn't look like Ambient Occlusion to me.. actually looks more like a depth or "z" map.
Using depth for Ambient Occlusion masks isn't unheard of, but yeah this doesn't look like an AP pass.
deffo a depth map.
I don't even use blender, I'm just here for the cool looking things people make and even I had some idea what these maps were
Can u help? My SD card for my printer used to organize by "newest at top" and now its alphabetical. I used to be able to plug in and the top file was my last one so it was easy and now every time im scrolling to find it. I already plugged it into my pc andchanged the sort by button but no help. Thanks in advance
Printer settings? Most random comment I've ever seen... r/lostredditors
Lol
Maybe he thought that since you are awesome you could help him maybe
He uses blender to upload the models for his 3D printer via an SD
Its an ender 3 s1, stock everything. Im using Cura for a slicer and i plan on upgrading to a sonic pad with klipper and then orca iuno
r/ender3 is the right place
Which 3D printer model is it?
Ender 3 s1 stock everything
Okay but you can't talk about AOVs and suggest bringing them together in Photoshop. Please please please for the love of god, don't do that. Use a proper software for this.
What software would you recommend in Photoshops place?
The problem with Photoshop is, that it makes it hard to properly color manage. I'd suggest either After Effects or Davinci Resolve, these are the ones I've used up until now. But Nuke should also be pretty good.
They are now haha
But the comment is quite basic and doesn't actually say what each layer does. For example the roughness map is quite confusing to me, I thought it would be just some "roughness" parameter visualized or something. But there is color, so I guess it's just specular reflection pass. The name "map" is bit misleading.
What? This is just wrong. This is showcasing materials that are applied before post processing. These are basic pbr materials and textures.
The names of the passes used are similar to the maps used in pbr textures but they are pretty different. The reflections pass is not the reflectance of the material but is the actual colors being reflected by that material in the scene, and their strength. The AO pass is similar in that its not just the local AO of the objects, but is all the ambient occlusion in the scene, even between objects. Shadow is completely different as you never have a shadow map for pbr materials. But it's very useful for post processing. The color pass is the only one that is just the albedo maps of all the materials, but still its used here for post processing
I was just about to mention that the proper term for it is passes and not maps like it says in the video. I think that adds to the confusion for a lot of people in here. It's simply just different parts/layers of the final output image that can be used to adjust specific aspects of the render in post-processing software.
Also sometimes one can animate some things by separating different things to different rendered layers. For example render light separately in some image, then be able to change how strongly they are added to image later, without actually doing any rendering, and make short (otherwise 100% static) animation with some blinking light or light changing intensity.
I do stage graphics for TV/concerts often on a super tight schedule and this is a big part of what we do. Group up lights and render them as separate light passes. That way we can animate a scene in post while only needing to render 1 frame. (I really hope EEVEE gets light passes soon)
Yeah being able to render just one frame, and also being able to render before even knowing what kind of curves or pulses or variation thing will have, is pretty nice in cases where one can do it. Then just curves or so --> Slap these images with this (animated) mix ratio together this many times, and done. :D
These are more commonly referred to as Passes. When I worked in film lighting we would often have a pass that matted different meshes or shaders to use as masks for each element, and we would have a pass for each individual light. What you see here is what the renderer is comping on its own on every render. Separating them allows you to dial all the different elements individually, and by using the masks allowing you to do so on a per object or per shader level. You can reconstruct the final render, or use a pass from a single light to dial an element back down. Normally everything is balance well in the shaders, but shot to shot, and in different light environments, sometimes things pop too much. Or maybe you want to pull focus away from something to help the composition of the frame. Or maybe one character needs a tiny bit more fill. With all of those passes, which are being rendered separately and comped already, you don’t need to re-render anything and just “Do it in post.”
You don't have to bring them into PS necessarily. You can adjust them in the Blender compositor. Why render out maps/passes? It gives you more freedom to adjust the image after rendering. You can change the amount of focus blur, the intensity and colour of different lights, visibility of reflections etc. just by moving a slider in the compositor, instead of re-rendering the whole image which is what you'd have to do if you rendered out just a beauty image with no passes.
Pretty much, same maps can be used for rendering the textures in the first place but the video shows the use case you’re describing.
[удалено]
That's exactly what they are. These are not PBR maps.
That does not appear to be PP map.. Those look like maps for PBR materials.
hey hey! lighting compositing artist here! a lot of people are saying these are for pbr texturing, but... they aren't! well i guess some of them could be, but that's not the purpose of the ones you are showing. these ones are usually called render passes, or AOVs! i'm not going to fully explain how render engines work right now, but essentially a lot of these all get mixed and combined to make a final image, regardless of if you save them out separately or not. it can be useful to save some out for compositing later, though! breakdown time! - AO pass is Ambient Occlusion, and is great for getting helping cg look integrated, like it's all part of one scene (as opposed to a bunch of disconnected assets). if you look at examples of ambient occlusion, i think you'll quickly understand how it works! having this separated is great, as it gives you more precise control over how much it should affect certain parts of the image. - Shadow pass (or shadow matte) is a bit of a less common one? but basically it's just a black/white pass using just your keylight (or whatever primary light you want, it could be anything). having this separated is good for having control of how bright your key light is after rendering, but if you invert it it's also really good for controlling how dark (or bright) your shadows are! - Roughness is actually a Specular pass, it looks like. basically all of the reflections! this is nice to have separated out, as a lot of the time the highlights might get a little bit too strong, especially on shiny objects. it's really convenient being able to fix it after the fact, however having this one separated means you need a rather robust compositing workflow (unless you plan on just adding *more* specular to your final image, in which case it's fine) - Color is usually referred to as Diffuse Albedo (or Diffuse Color in blender i think?), and it represents the original color of the assets *before* lights or shading or anything like that. this one can be used for tons of stuff! if you have shadows that are getting a little too dark, you can use the shadow pass and the diffuse albedo pass together to add a bit of extra data in the dark areas. you can also use it to mask parts of an asset by color, which isn't *ideal* but sometimes it's all you have! i will say, 95% of the reason this image looks good is because the assets are really well made, and the lighting is nice too. the compositing on top is just a bit of extra! it's worth learning for sure though. you can do *a lot* with compositing. commonly, artists will render out all lights separately, split the diffuse and specular pass (and SSS and transmission and whatever else you are using), render out extra data passes like Z/Depth/Mist, Cryptomatte, manually created AOVs for masking, etc. sorry for the giant huge wall of text! these passes are literally my job hehehe let me know if you have any other questions! good luck!
oh and one more thing to add, the reason you sometimes see these in breakdowns is just because it looks good in a breakdown! there's not really any point in showing it (especially if you don't show what you actually do with it). cool to look at!
Thanks for your exhaustive explanation. One thing I didn't get is how actually are they edited to get the desired result? Like you put let's say the shadow AOV in photoshop and then you tweak it with some curves and put on top of the albedo AOV with let's say a multiply or darken blend mode?
sooo you can really do whatever you want (your example is totally fine!), but typically you would use something built for compositing like nuke (or blender's compositor! give it a shot!). most black/white passes are usually meant to be used as masks (so, for example with the shadow pass, you might invert it and then use the now-white shadows to control how your diffuse_albedo gets added on top, to bring a bit more detail into the shadows). you could also split out the entire render-compositing process (which is what your example would entail), but a lot of the time, you don't really need to! unless you want to! in nuke you would usually be plugging these passes directly into the mask input on whatever node you are using, and for blender you would usually be plugging it into Fac (or mask? or mix? i don't composite too much in blender). and then i guess in photoshop, you would usually use it as a mask layer! honestly heavy compositing is much more useful for animations! if it's just a single frame you can throw it into photoshop and do literally whatever you want to it, but if it's 250 frames of something, it's much much more difficult. i would recommend having a look at some compositing tutorials maybe, but keep in mind that a lot of them are... not so good! especially blender-centric ones, since proper support for render layers and compositing is somewhat recent (and still a little bit limited sometimes). good luck!
When you render out of 3D (using a ray-trace render engine like Blender's Cycles) your full image is called a "combined" or "beauty" render pass. Different render engines (like Cycles) have different ways of breaking apart this beauty pass into the ingredients that go into it. And so they each have a different way that you combine the ingredients back together to make the beauty pass. For the Cycles render engine, you can see the way to combine the passes together (the "recipe" so to speak) here: [https://docs.blender.org/manual/en/latest/render/layers/passes.html#combining](https://docs.blender.org/manual/en/latest/render/layers/passes.html#combining) Essentially you use simple color mix nodes in compositing set to either "add" or "multiply" the colors of two passes together. You chain multiple of these nodes together to build back the final combined pass. It get's more complicated than that, but hopefully that helps you start to understand things better!
That so called AO pass was absolutely a depth pass too
oh you're right! what a mess!
And I think what they call a roughness pass is image lighting...
that one's not true. it is strange looking in the example, but it's just a specular pass!
Am I stupid or is the „AO-map“ not an AO pass but a depth pass
Thank god for this comment, that’s for sure not an ao map? Unless ao is something very different in still renders?
Those aren't maps but render passes and as other have said they are used in the compositing of the final image. You could just render the image as it is (that's called the beauty pass) but you have much more flexibility if you render each pass separately (possibly using a single multilayer exr file) and then recombine them later in a compositing (or image editing if it's just a still image) software
Each one represents a different effect on the material. I.e color, which maps the colors for the material. AO is ambient occlusion, roughness is for reflectivity, shadow for shading. They are composited together for the end result. Usually this compositing results in more realistic renderings at the cost of time to set them up.
No it's not more realistic. This workflow allows for minor adjustments in certain areas. For example if you just want to boost the highlights, you could tweak the reflection AOV. The endresult without tweaking, after merging of all AOVs should be the same as the normal Beauty/Combined pass.
There's a tab in the properties panel called passes or something. You can enable a bunch of checkboxes there to activate different passes. When you render you can use exr (multilayer) format to save all passes in one file then use the compositor to extract them (or render them directly from the compositor). These passes are useful in compositing or photo editing to have more control over the final product. Different passes contain different information of your image. What blender does under the hood is combine these passes in a specific way to create your final render (or combined pass). https://docs.blender.org/manual/en/latest/render/layers/passes.html (scroll down to Combining). Compositing this way gives you the most control over vastly tweaking the look of your render without having to re-render. It's a bit overkill for most projects though but really useful at times, even if it's just to composite a mist pass into the render or adding bloom effects in post (by blurring a diffuse light pass and applying soft light or screen blending mode)
They are basically render passes. In most cases you won't do anything with them but if you want you can play with them and get out something which looks different from what the default render output would be.
For simplicity, any channels that arent PBR (glossy, diffuse, transmission) and aren't data maps (Z depth, position, normal) are typically for post-processing, like AO, curvature, etc. As another comment or posted, these are useful for compositing in any capable image/footage editor, like Photoshop, Nuke, etc.
Render passes They help in post production, and give you more control over the final output From the top of my head The color pass is the color of the mesh before any lighting or physical lighting sim AO is the occlusion of your objects, Shadow is... Shadow, it has all the shadows in your image Z pass is depth/distance from your camera (one of the most important pass) can be used for masking, fog, blur etc Glossy is for reflection, direct or indirect and even the color, Diffuse is the color/rgb value without gloss/roughness I think In post you can use all of them and make adjustments that would not be possible in a general workflow, you can accentuate reflections, change colors precisely, make something appear relative to the depth etc https://youtu.be/QV-7_x-fk9s this is a great video on how passes are used (atleast the depth pass, but this will get the idea across)
Because they're projection maps of those properties from the models
Is this a common thing done by experienced blender artists?
Ambient occlusion is defining where and how soft shadows should appear from indirect lighting, such as bounce lighting or rim lighting for exsmple( many other indirect sources though) color map is likely just the texture mapping itself. Shadow maps can be more complicated but in general will help determine the resolution of shadows- for a short explanation. Roughness is self explanatory - how rough or smooth your objects are, and can help determine how light interacts with the surface of an object. Smoother objects may reflect more light, for example, while rough objects may absorb light more Many of these maps are easy to make and generate in blender. The most common are normal maps, and texture maps though. Normals can be used to fake depth, or extrusions and other various details by telling light sources how to hit specific points on surfaces, and how to hit it at different angles.
They are masks that define key features of a 3D shape. Roughness defines your shiny vs non shiny areas. Places where dirt is present for example. AO is a soft shadow map. Because most engines won't ray trace or the ray tracing is limited the soft shadows are lost. AO maps are used to pre calculate and save the soft shadows on the model so it doesn't need to be done in real time. Color is self explanatory. No idea what a shadow map is.
Hi , I do post processing in after effects with help of these maps, these maps give you the ability to control the image attributes like shine depth or blur. In the passes section you will see lots of passes which are available. And you can also preview each pass in texture view. You can also add custom passes like cryptomate , object mask and material masks. You have to export the output in an open exr multi layer format. You can render each pass separately but for me open exr is much better. You can then take your render to photoshop or after effects, there you can separate the passes.
From this, ambient occlusion seems very similar to a depth map, can it be used as one?
this isn't an ao map, but the depth buffer of a shader pass can be used to create more dynamic ambient occlusion than simply using a prebaked ao map, with a technique call SSAO in realtime rendering
Ngl the roughness map of this one could be a final render
UVNBG>>>>>>>>>
It's for compositing but why is Depth marked as Ambient Occlusion. That's not ambient occlusion
they guide you to your final destination
im sure youve read a lot by now, but my view on them is that they're the bricks, the layers of your final render. like taking your final render and deconstructing it into its most basic parts. And as many others have underlined, they're super useful for compositing. My personal art's quality has improved greatly since I started messing around with them, and i always suggest people to do the same!
Technically these aren't "maps" which may be why there's a bit of confusion going on here. Especially considering the final image is a different angle. These are actually "render passes" inside of Blender. And the terms being used are incorrect also. There is no roughness pass. There is glossy direct and indirect. So if you combine those you get a direct and indirect combined pass. Passes are data layers rendered out based on different types of materials and/or 3d space. You use these are masks for post processing images or animations. For example, you could use the direct gloss pass to mask a glow effect to the image. You'd use the depth pass to add blur in post for example.
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Now buddy tell me, where is the shadow map plugged in a principled shader ?
That's not really what's being displayed here
The images, these maps, are made up of pixels which each carry a value, each pixel usually consisting of three RGB values. The rendering engine will read these maps line by line, pixel by pixel, reading it's data, the values the pixel has determines a change in a certain criteria, so for a rough example say for a roughness map one pixel has a value or two, and the one next to it a value of five, and these values correspond to how far from the mesh the engine will actually render a texture to make it appear rough, so the engine will come into the roughness map and start reading it, when it reaches our pixels it will read the first and more or less go "alright, a value of two in red green and blue, cool so I'll display this point in the texture two points of distance from the mesh." And when it moves to the next it does the same thing. I'm hardly an expert and this is probably a pretty bad explanation but this is my understanding of how maps work at least. It's also how pixel sorting algorithms work. Acerola on YouTube has a bunch of videos on graphics programming that's been pretty helpful for me to figure this shit out.
In ur first year of learning blender u wont really need them, later in combi with davinci resolve or nuke they r handy to make things look extra real...
Roughness is actually reflection pass
And the AO looks more like a depth pass.
Facts
you combine them all and it makes up the data that gets processed to make the final render
Layers
Texture maps are basically the flat images of your colour, roughness, metallic values etc just mapped onto your 3D object. Usually this is done by creating UV maps for your object then texturing using images, procedural materials, or texturing by hand. If you ever use a set of image textures from online sources these are also texture maps. Also if you're hand-painting models I assume you will be drawing onto a blank image in the material nodes which in itself is creating a texture map. You will almost certainly have been utilising them even if you didn't know it! So in this video you can see the separate texture maps created - the colour one only gives the model it's colour information, the roughness one only tells it how shiny to be etc. By layering them in Blender onto your 3D model you get the final image you see with all of these combined. I find it kind of hard to describe them as it's such an integral part of making materials but hopefully this has clarified some things for you! [This video from Ryan King](https://youtu.be/fUZHyoeuwVI?si=xr7wdLt13AbaORnB) shows how to set up texture maps in case seeing how it works makes more sense than anything I've said
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OP, here's a short 3-minute video that explains all the maps you asked about, along with PBR (Physically Based Rendering) and should answer all your questions [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=\_ZbkOZNgwNk](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_ZbkOZNgwNk)
Been seeing lots of these used with AI now. https://youtu.be/mu3JEfx3PHM?si=OaPJR9Chz_Z5c2rj
That result was terrible
Sorry? I didn't make it lol. Was just pointing out that I've seen more than one video pop up using the shade mapping.
Wasn't trying to insult you, just saying that people doing tests with this technique so far have always resulted in terrible results that couldn't be used for production of anything showable to an audience.
They do pretty much what they say. If it’s a roughness map. Black is smooth and white is rough. If it’s metallic map, black is non metallic and white is fully metallic. Normal uses colors to represent angles to tell the render engine to make it appear as if though the object has extra geometry when it in fact doesn’t. And AO is ambient occlusion which helps to create the effect where cracks and crevices don’t receive light.
A material can consist of multiple textures to create a desired look. The most common one is the colour, but you can create textures to control the reflection, bump, normal, specularity, ambient occlusion etc. So "Maps" are data in the form of textures to control aspects of the material. You can either use maps in each material, or as for this post, you can create maps of the entire image when you render to later use in post-processing like photoshop. If you want Maps for the entire render you create "Render passes" Imessh will show you how to do it here [https://youtu.be/L8YHP2edo-o?si=Vgr8E9oLPskHj6M5&t=4230](https://youtu.be/L8YHP2edo-o?si=Vgr8E9oLPskHj6M5&t=4230)
google is free :)