The purpose of creating Spotmask is to provide 3D professionals with rendering channel elements for mental ray, which are very useful in the post-processing and compositing stages of their workflow. By default, Mental Ray provides many common rendering elements, but lacks some very useful data transfer or requires tedious solutions to create.

Spotmask fills this gap by providing easy-to-use rendering elements, and the data generated by these rendering elements has been proven to be very valuable in the post-processing stage of rendering images.

Spotmask is a plugin for Autodesk 3ds Max that can render additional precise rendering elements in mental ray:

1. World Position Pass (Scene Position Information)
2. UVW Pass (texture mapping information)
3. Normal Pass (Surface Normal Data)
4. Velocity Pass (speed transfer of motion blur post-processing effects)
5. Curvature Pass (Convex Concave Output)
6. Depth channel (depth shader)

These advanced output channels allow 3D artists to make flexible adjustments to their images and animations during post-processing and compositing.

Spotmask is a fast and easy-to-use solution that meets the requirements of strict image and video synthesis workflows.

What is Spotmask rendering element?

World Location Pass:

The Spotmask world position channel enables 3D artists to better select and modify any area of an image or animation sequence after rendering.

Unlike Z-depth, world position data is saved independently of camera views: even if the camera moves or objects are not in the camera view, it still maintains a masked state.

Through this method, artists can modify colors, blurs, and visibility, or add any effects to selected areas of their rendered 3D environment.

UVW - through:

Have you ever thought about changing the texture in the scene after rendering instead of rendering it again?

UVW Pass is your perfect solution: simply add Spotmask UVW Pass rendering elements to mental ray, and it will provide you with the necessary texture information. Using this image information, you can access and modify every texture of the image or animation.

Speed Pass:

Undoubtedly, motion blur is one of the most time-consuming components in animation rendering.

Although 3ds Max already provides two default options for generating velocity data, the version of Spotmask offers significant improvements for camera motion. The default speed rendering element does not generate view related data and completely ignores camera movement. It is only suitable for scenes with static cameras. The G-Buffer speed channel does take into account camera motion and create view related data, but camera motion is mistakenly considered and blurred in the wrong direction of movement.

Ordinary pass:

This rendering element allows you to store the orientation of all surfaces facing. This data can later be used to generate accurate reflections for light sources that did not exist during the original rendering. Spotmask exports the normal directions in the original color space and clamp color space from mental ray world space, object space, and camera space.

Curvature Pass:

Spotmask implements highly precise and customizable curvature rendering channels. Curvature rendering elements determine the strength of an object's surface bending at any given location. It also distinguishes between convex and concave angles.

This information can be used during post-processing to detect and modify grooves and ridges on objects. For example, artists can control two different topological properties in the final image: the geometric area of "bulge" (convex) or "insert" (concave). It can enrich your final composition with beautiful AO fake appearance or additional color details in wrinkled mesh sections.

Thickness passed through:

This rendering element determines the volume thickness of the object on its surface.

This information can later be used to add modifications such as transparency or shading to objects that consider their volume rather than uniformity.

What are the advantages of Spotmask?

Speed, flexibility, and access to advanced image post-processing capabilities.

We all have clients who want to change the color, blur, or any other effect after the animation is completed. We all know how much time and resources it takes to render all the content again due to small changes in the scene. The advanced post-processing methods facilitated by Spotmask allow you to efficiently perform these tasks in your favorite composting software (Fusion, Nuke, etc.) without the need for repetitive and time-consuming rendering work.

Spotmask is very suitable for:

Animation artists, technical directors, film studios, and all those who render time-consuming and constantly changing animations. In addition, using velocity channels in synthesis can create approximate motion blur replacements, which typically look almost as good as rendered motion blur - a small fraction of the time required.

compatibility

Spotmask was created for the 3ds Max mental ray renderer. Fully supports network rendering and distributed rendering.

Supported 3ds Max versions: 3ds Max 2010, 2011, 2012, 2013, 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017, and 2018 (32-bit and 64 bit)

*Please note that the correct Spotmask speed transfer is applicable to Max 20 version. The implementation of vector rendering in 3ds Max versions prior to 2014 was incorrect and did not render vectors for static geometry.