Professional Production Pipeline 2.
Practical Applications of Render Buffers

Recap/Preface
In the previous article, we traced the movement away from trying to perfect renders "In Camera" within the 3D package itself, and toward working with the rendered information as a base, in real-time, in a compositing package. We took a look at some of the Render Buffers that LightWave works with to create its final rendered image that we also have access to with a good Buffer Saver plug-in.

In this article, I'll be going through some practical applications of working with just a few of the Render Buffers. To cover as much ground as possible, I will be leaving it up to you to flesh-out your knowledge if I talk about a tool you don't yet know.

Toolset
The two commercial tools I'll be using in this article are:

ExrTrader (from db&w, exrtrader.com ), is what I'll be using for saving the LW buffers I'll be using into a single, layered, 32bit Floating-Point, openEXR file.

Fusion5 (from eyeon software, eyeonline.com ), is what I'll be using as the compositing package to manipulate the Render Buffers into something greater than the sum of their parts.

If you use other packages, just look around to see where your controls that enable the same things I'll be doing are kept. The engines that drive 3D and compositing are generally the same, the interfaces require them to be driven in different ways, with elegance or exertion.

Saving Buffers

Once I have my scene ready to render, I point the Output of LightWave's files to the location and name I'd like for my rendered files. For the type of file to be rendered, with extTrader installed, I choose "OpenEXR Dummy(.exr)". This stores my output path and filename prefix for the other parts of exrTrader to access, but doesn't actually write a file, (though I could choose to save something small, like .JPG, so I could flip through the rendered files with a simple image-viewer like xnView or ACDSee).