Cryptomatte improvements

[j_man]

Hi team,

It would be great to get Cryptomatte working better;
- They only work with CXR files. What is the limitation? Can we have them working with EXR files? Multilayered or seperae? Can we have the manifest as a sidecar JSON file? Nuke will accept this OK.
- Cryptomattes should work with materials, not just hierarchies and layers.

Your feedback is appreciated.

J.

[TomG]

By Material is already in the daily builds. The other items are more dependent on the mix of native DCC file save routines and ours, so are more complex.

[j_man]

Nice to hear from you Tom!

Great to hear that the options for creating Cryptomattes are in development.

Are you saying that it isn't possible through the standard render save dialog? Is this how VRay can save Cryptomattes to EXR files, because it has its own fileoutput option in the renderer?

J.

[j_man]

Something I've overlooked, Cryptomatte requires 32bit depth. Now, could we utilise a multi depth EXR? Or save an the Cryptomatte layers only at 32bit?


J.

[Ingus]

Hi!
Its nice that Cryptomatte works with materials now. Thanks!

CXR limitation is still a bit hard to accept, at least for our use case. Now our FullHD frame is about 50 MB (with all the elements we need, half float). Same image saved as CXR is ~150 MB (full float). For 2000 frame animation that is 100GB vs 300GB difference. And that is before Cryptomatte element is added.

[alexyork]

CXR is indeed basically unstably enormous, unfortunately. We only ever use it when absolutely necessary, which is a shame because it brings some great benefits of flexibility. But storage including backup costs is not trivial, and the difference is indeed huge.