RPManager Forum

I don't fully understand how the capture sets work

I am looking to create capture sets so that I can have lights01 and furniture01... visibile on Cam01_Pass01, and then to have lights02 and furniture02 visible on Cam02_Pass02. When rendering Pass01 everything from Pass02 should be turned off and vice versa.

I have created a capture set that includes the lights, for example, and selected "Light properties to Capture" and selected "On" for the lights which seems to be the best option? I am not sure what to do after this point, how do you change everything on a per pass/camera basis, so that one light is on for one pass and off for another etc?

Hi

I'd recommend using visibility sets to control the visibility of objects per pass, and capture sets for the properties such as the light on.

Visibility sets are straightforward - you have objects in a set, and a set can be assigned to each pass (reused or one per pass). When the pass is restored, anything in the set is made visible, anything not in the set is hidden. Layersets can be used if you have a layer based workflow, or layers themselves, or scripted vis sets among other options.

For the capture sets, once you have set up your set with the light 'on' property and added the objects to the set to be controlled, you should simply restore a pass and then set the light on/off states as you want them for that pass - just set it as you want it. Repeat for the other passes, restore the next pass, turn lights on/off. Then when you then go back and restore a pass, the specified properties of the objects in the capture set are restored to the state you set them to. There is a spreadsheet to help manage properties and across multiple passes without having to restore, but the setting it to what you want and then moving on I've always considered quite intuitive.

There is a button to enable/disable the auto capturing as you change passes, but this is on by default and generally doesn't need to be turned off.

Conceptually all object properties could be controlled with a single capture set, and all properties could be captured - RPM's system allows you to specify just what you want to capture (it's faster apart from anything else) and multiple sets can be used to help manage the objects being controlled. Having geometry in a set that is turning light enabled on/off is not a problem as only relevant properties are captured/restored, but I tend to keep the sets separated by geometry type - ie lights and geo in separate sets.

Does that help at all?

cheers,
grant