Render Layers- Turning Off Masterbeauty Default Pass?

[ragecg]

hey all:)

When one sets up any number of passes in the Render Layer Editor, by default Maya outputs NOT ONLY the pass you want, but ALSO a MasterBeauty pass of your whole scene. (i.e. the master layer)

How do I friggin turn this OFF? lol.

I have a 3d matte projection that is rendering at 2k res.
Each “beauty” pass takes around 2 minutes per frame to render. (luckily the shot is only 120 frames)

Then:
For every separate render layer (pass) that I setup, for example, a simple preset Matte pass of a few objects, that by itself, takes a NANOSECOND to render, Maya also takes the time to ALSO render a MasterBeauty pass along with every matte pass frame rendered.

Its very annoying and needlessly time consuming.

So, where do we turn the MasterBeauty feature off?
I searched the help, and all it says is that it DOES output this pass for every layer rendered, NOT how to turn it off.

Thanks in advance anyone!

ragecg

PS, I’m rendering using Mental Ray, in case that makes a diff.
And it looks like it MAY because when I right-click on the layer, and choose Attributes, under the Render Pass Options there is a beauty pass checked to ON, BUT:
the title of the flyout is:
Render Pass Options (obsolete for Mental Ray) so this does nothing to stop the extra MasterBeauty pass from being rendered.

[joojaa]

this all is conditional off course to the fact that you actually know the difference between a render pass and render layer. Which isn't so clear form the post. As you sortof use the terms interchangeably. They mean wildly different things.

If you talk of pure render layers with NO Passes

then just uncheck the r next to masterLayer. But somehow i dont think you'd ask this if that were so.

If you truly talk of render passes: (probably if your using maya 2009 or custom shaders)

QUOTE(ragecg @ 01/03/09, 04:37 AM) [snapback]298062[/snapback]
How do I friggin turn this OFF?

You don't, when the rendered spits out multiple outputs form one render then its the master render its doing the other renders just happen to be split of form that one (so it just wirtes several files out at once). Now it needs this frame buffer to produce your work at all (it uses this layer as a sort of how to generate the super sampling base). So whetever you do maya would make this pass anyway. And theres no option in maya to output a render to memory only, mainly because the negative effect of putting it on disk so is so small.

QUOTE
Its very annoying and needlessly time consuming.

When you render mutiple passes form one render (as opposed to just vanilla multiple render layers) it all happens form that ONE render so it is actually its not consuming any time, more than the time it takes to write it on disk. Because as said it need to do thsi anyway.

So yes you could make a null output file format if you wished. Do you really need to do thsi for something that impacts nothing in your render*. Its a bit like the z buffer if you dont output it then it gets calculated anyway.

Well to be honest you can organize your shader so that the master pass actually is one of the secondary passes. But unless you wirte your own outputters it doesnt beome nice on your work flow. Hence you dont.

• i can only think of one reason not to output this and that is your using a laptop as your renderer, well your going to run out fo disk very very fast (for the same price i bought my laptop i got a workstation with 4 TEARBYTES of disk, that is in all other capabilities better too)

For ~2000 euros you can get a 12-15 Terabyte raid stack that could house a bit above half a million uncompressed floating point full hd frames. Offcourse no one uses thees uncompressed formats so you could store easily 4-5 times that. Or about 4 hours of 12 layers per each. So that's a full length movie with mirror redundancy. Ofcourse if your doing a 4k movie then you must contend with 4 layers (off course bigger frames compress more)