Monday, January 23rd, 2017 Posted by Jim Thacker

Cryptomatte automatically pulls ID mattes from renders


Originally posted on 13 July 2016. Scroll down for news of the new Fusion plugin.

Psyop has open-sourced Crytomatte, its in-house technology for generating ID mattes for the individual objects and materials within a 3D scene automatically from the rendered frame.

The technology is now supported in alShaders, Anders Langlands’ physically based shader library for Arnold, enabling Arnold users to generate ID mattes from their scenes.

Once generated, mattes can be loaded into Nuke via Psyop’s free plugin.

Automatically generate ID mattes complete with motion blur and DoF
Created by Psyop head of VFX Andy Jones and software developer Jonah Friedman, Cryptomatte creates ID mattes automatically using information already available at render time, like object and material names.

It supports motion blur, transparency, and depth of field, generating sophisticated, production-ready mattes. The resulting output is then packaged into a single EXR file, for import into a compositor.

Now available for Maya-Arnold-Nuke pipelines
Although the technology was shown publicly at Siggraph 2015, this week’s 1.01 release marks the first point at which Cryptomatte is “no longer be a ‘Psyop-only’ technique”, according to the company’s blog.

The update coincides with Weta VFX sequence supervisor Anders Langlands’ integration of the technology into his industry-standard alShaders, enabling Arnold users to generate cryptomattes.

Psyop has also released a Nuke plugin that enables the compositing software to decode the ID mattes generated, available free from the sofware’s GitHub repository.

Together, the two releases make it possible for artists and studios running Maya/Arnold-Nuke pipelines to integrate Cryptomatte into their production workflow.

Support for other software to come?
The firm hopes that the release will prompt third-party developers to support other 2D and 3D applications.

According to Psyop’s blog post: “[We] hope that it encourages the implementations in other renderers; just as we hope Anders’ 3D implementation will encourage more decoders for 2D compositing packages.”

Availability
The Cryptomatte specification is available on the software’s GitHub repository under a BSD 3-clause licence. The Nuke plugin also free, and also available via GitHub.

alShaders is also open-source, and is compatible with Arnold 4.2.12.2 running on Windows, Linux and OS X.


Updated 23 January 2017: Cryptomatte also now works with Blackmagic Design’s Fusion as well as Nuke, through a new integration plugin developed by Belgium’s Grid VFX.

You can see a video showing Cryptomatte in use inside Fusion here, and download the plugin itself from Psyop’s GitHub repository via the link below. It should work in both the free and Studio editions of Fusion.


Read more about Cryptomatte on Psyop’s blog

Download alShaders from Anders Langlands’ website

Read Anders Langlands’ tutorial on using the Cryptomatte AOVs in alShaders

Download the free Cryptomatte plugins for Nuke and Fusion from Psyop’s GitHub repository