Normal Pass

This pass (also in combination with the Positions Pass) can be used with any 3D-capable composition program (e.g., The Foundry Nuke or even Fusion) to create all sorts of effects such as re-illumination or re-shading without having to have the actual 3D geometry at hand.

The Normal Pass is an enhancement (with various modifiable parameters) to the Material Normal Multi-Pass function.

A Normal Pass encodes the direction of the visible surface normals as an RGB image.

Tip:Because the positions are encoded in 32-bit and can also contain negative values, such a pass can only be saved in 32-bit. The following formats can be used: B3D, OpenEXR, PSD, PSB, TIF. OpenEXR is recommended.
Note that Photoshop CS5 often has difficulty with negative values and cannot correctly read the OpenEXR layers.

Make sure the following are enabled in the Render Settings menu when using this post effect:

  • Multi Pass
  • the Multi Pass Post Effect option
  • the Normal Pass effect

Edge antialiasing is purposely not included in the Position Pass because this would make it unusable.

© MAXON Computer - Impressum