I’ve been reading a lot about the nodes system but due to my noobiness on Blender my answer could not find it’s answer. Yet.
Summing up, my question is: how to have an Ambient Occlusion pass overlayed on a toon shaded pass in the same output, for an animation? That is, simply rendering and doing the composition of both passes on Blender?
As far as I could understand, I would have each pass rendered on a Render Layer node, using an Add node or something connected to a Composite node.
Problem is, so far as my testings have gone, I will need one “scene setting” for each pass. So this question may be not much about render nodes, but how to have two materials over the same mesh/face/object. I supose this would be with render layers, but then it’s when my noobiness on Blender comes in. How to have just the MATERIALS AND LIGHTS different on another second layer?
How one would proceed on setting up a render where mesh and rigs are shared among Render Layer Nodes but the difference is on the materials and lights used for each one of them?
Select all (CTRL+A) > CTRL+L (Make links to scene…you have to already have another empty scene to link to) > goto the next scene and select all (except the camera) and Ukey - Make Single User (Materials & Tex). Now load this scene into the nodes compositor of the ffirst scene and go to work.
A whole new world opened before my eyes… This is mega cool!
Sorry for the huge delay on a response, but THANK YOU VERY MUCH!!
So, suposedly I want to do the AO pass over an animation, I can simply copy the whole scene to a new one and it would copy the rig AND the animation? (I have yet to start learn rigging on Blender).
So, theoretically, I would finish the model, finish the toon material, finish the rig, do one animation shot, everything on the basic “toonscene”. Then just copy the ENTIRE scene (including rig and animation) to a new one and set the AO pass stuff there (light, material and raytrace/aproximate AO). Then setup the nodes on the basic scene and render the composite out of it.
So I think I understand, but just run it by me again…RamboBaby…, because I am not sure if Eks understood what you were saying, and I have a similar interest in the same question. Thank you for the assistance to another Noob.
Paul
I think I understand, yes. What I don’t understand is the difference between:
Link Objects
Link ObData
Full Copy
This are the options when you add a new scene. Full copy is obvius, and objects are independent from each other. But what’s the difference between link objects and link obdata??
I quickly tried both and they look the same. Objects are just shared among scenes, and any change I make to one is refletected on the other.
Which is not usefull for my case, since all the meshes will need a new material on the AO scene.
Maybe I can make a copy of the meshes only and have a link for the armature and camera?
I’m just worried there might be something out of sync between the scenes when I send the render, but if I do it as the last step and carefully it shouldn’t be a problem hopefully.
EDIT: I also didn’t found a way to visualize which object is a copy and which is a link. The outliner shows them the same way as for both scenes. Is there somewhere to visualize this?
If you link object data only, any changes in object mode (e.g. position, rotation, scale) will not be shared between scenes.
Which is not usefull for my case, since all the meshes will need a new material on the AO scene.
Note that you can link materials to both objects and object data. The “OB” and “ME” buttons on the “Links and Pipeline” panel control which ones will be used for rendering. This way you can have two scenes with shared object data but separate (object-linked) materials.
To carify:
-link objects: Makes each object the same in each scene so any change to an object (even scale,rotation, movement) will be copied to the other scenes since they are linked
-link obdata: Makes a copy of all objects but links to the same obejctdata blocks. (Can be seen in the OOPSSchema view in the outliner. Choose OOPS in view menu) This means all operations on the meshdata, material data etc will be linked to other objects in the scene. All operations on the object (scale, rotation, movement) will be independent.
-full copy: produced a complete independent copy of objects and objdata. Any chagnes in one scene will not be copied to othere scenes.