I have hardly used the compositor, however I was thinking about rendering a small animation and realized that it could take a long time to complete each frame. So basically I thought that maybe I could render just the ambient occlusion animation, then the base color, then the lighting information in separate passes, and then composite them together in the video in realtime - is this possible atm?
If I understand you question right, yes, it is. What I would do if I were to do this, first, I would make my layers, each one rendering a separate pass(e.g color, AO, etc). I would really just play around with it and see what you get, I think to many blender users rely on tutorials, witch make them not able to make stuff on there own. If you are like me, then you will really like the compositor once you get into it.
Thanks, yeah you seem to get the idea! I agree about tutorials I think they’re useful when you need them, and a potential time burner if you watch them too often, I need to keep working on models to get any satisfactory results. I have some experience of shading script from other renderers so I think I understand what I need to do with cycles, from what I have learned already it is quite flexible. I was actually thinking today about using one photon mapped model as a textured model in cycles, so the indirect lighting is baked into the models material channels - this could potentially work with AO etc for more realistic images, although the animation isn’t intended to be accurate and photo-realistic anyway 