[Asmithey]

Is there a way to select all my materials and turn on or off the different channels that I need instead of doing each material one by one? It takes a long time to each one individually. If not, this would be a good right click menu option to turn channels on and off with multiple materials selected.

I have not seen this option anywhere. If it exists I apologize.

Thanks,

Aaron

[Mihai]

Which channels in the material?

[Asmithey]

Yes. In the materials. I meant to post this in the wish list section....

oops.

Thanks,

[Mihai]

I ment which things in the materials would like like to disable/enable for all of them? It's a pretty strange to do that's why I'm asking

[Asmithey]

I have a project with many materials and I want non of them but one, my ground plane, to render. The rest I want black matte enabled so I can get all the shadows still on my ground plane. So I thought it might be useful if I could enable black matte for all my other materials with a quicker method rather than enabling them one at a time.

I did them all one by one and got the result I expected but it took awhile to enable the black matte channels on all the materials.

[Mihai]

It might be a better option in this case just to enable the shadow option in the material applied to the ground plane, and turning on Shadow channel in render options. You will then get a separate image with all the shadows that fall on the plane. I think it would require a pretty big change to be able to edit multiple materials at once.

What is your workflow in this case? I mean the purpose of just the rendered ground plane with shadows, to be used in what way later on?

[Asmithey]

I have a rendering that is rendering on a render farm. I downloaded a preview and noticed my gravel ground plane was not textured properly. I can not start the render over since I am paying for it to render on a farm. So I needed to retexture the ground plane and render it on my machine and I needed all the shadows from the plants and the buildings to render on the ground plane as well. So I set all the materials to black matte except the ground plane. It worked fine just took awhile to set it up.

[Mihai]

Ok, thanks for the explanation In this situation a pretty easy workaround would be to save another version of the scene and apply the same mat to all the other objects that you want to use the matte option for.

[Asmithey]

I see.

I am having trouble getting the shadow pass to work. I am sure I am doing something incorrect. I read the manual and it basically says to enable all the materials with the shadow channel that you want to catch shadows. In my case, that is all of the materials. And then to check shadow pass in the render options. I set all the materials to have the shadow channel enabled. I checked the shadow pass option in the render options dialogue. All I get is an all white image and no shadows. Am I mixing something up here?

Thanks,

Aaron