The tool also supports motion blur, transparency and depth of field, making it a complete solution for the mattes problem. Arnold users can now also create Cryptomattes at home, something that was previously reserved for Psyop employees within the studio.
Together with Anders Langlands’ open-source shader set, AlShaders for Arnold, Psyop artist Jonah Friedman has been working since last year’s Siggraph to recruit people for the “Cryptomatte Commitee”. Since then, it has made it its task to develop Cryptomatte into an open standard. Following the successful completion of the mission, Anders is the first to implement Cryptomatte on the 3D side in an open set of shaders. In addition, Cryptomatte can currently be used in Nuke on the compositing side.
Through the open-source route, Friedman hopes that implementations will also emerge for other renderers and compositing packages in the future.
Here you can download Cryptomatte on GitHub.
About Psyop: The studio has locations in Los Angeles, New York City and Vancouver and works on 3D projects in advertising, VR & AR, film & TV and games.
Incidentally, Cinesite also uses this practical ID-based way of working in rendering and compositing to save time and artists’ nerves. Though naturally it uses its own internally developed variant. In the next issue of DP, VFX supervisor Holger Voss will report on it for “Independence Day 2: Resurgence”.
Archive notice: This article was originally published on July 11, 2016. Links and embedded videos are preserved as part of the historical record.
