While reading up on how Pillars of Eternity handles lighting effects for its 2D backgrounds, an albedo pass came up, as one of the four effect layers they composite to create the final background. Looking it up, I found it has to do with reflectivity of light; and the background in the image labeled ‘albedo’ in this example looks like something you’d seen in the ‘full-bright’ mode of a game editor window.
Is there any way to render out an image like that in Blender; a so-called ‘full-bright’ image- an albedo pass? I’ve mucked around briefly with render layers, but I haven’t come up with anything.
The pass in that image appears to be diffuse lighting without any shadows? Cycles doesn’t have a pass that delivers exactly that. Currently, meshlights and the world always cast shadows in the diffuse passes, which makes outputting something like that impossible. If you could disable that - and there is a patch in the tracker for this - you should be able to get that by rendering out the 3 diffuse passes and combining them like usual.
Diffuse direct = light shining on diffuse surfaces
Diffuse indirect = global illumination
Diffuse color = raw albedo of the surface (aka the BSDF color, they’re the same thing). Multiplied by the sum of the first 2 passes.
This is the one I was thinking of, but it seems I was mistaken. It doesn’t include disabling shadows for mesh/world lights, just includes them in the shadow pass. https://developer.blender.org/D524
So I guess there isn’t a way currently to get an unshaded diffuse pass. Btw, the 3 passes posted in that image won’t produce the one labeled “final”. What else did they use?
Yeah, but my point is there’s no way to get the “final” image from the 3 passes shown. The final image there contains shadows, and none of the 3 passes there contain any. There have to be others besides what is shown there, I’d imagine.
This is the blog post I pulled the image from. It includes text and a video about how they did it, but those 4 passes are all they mention. The video does show emissive light-cards being used for the window glow on real-time 3D characters in the Unity editor, but that doesn’t directly affect how the background is composited.
