I want to ask if there is any chance to add Houdini Deep Image maps for matte like you have now RenderMan dtex,
I use deep camera maps in houdini for matte.
For example:
I have fluid sim in Houdini, and particles sim, but i want to render in Maya with Vray and Krakatoa.
My mesh is 45-65mil polygons, so its hard to use that in krakatoa for matte.
But i can render in Houdini deep maps with mesh that i have, and use later in Krakatoa as matte for my particles.
We weren’t planning on supporting RAT files, but it is possible if that is an important feature. We were hoping to just use EXR 2.0 eventually, and forget everything else. However, that may not happen for a while since renderers won’t start outputting deep EXR 2.0 images for a while I’m guessing.
In an ideal world, if you were rendering in Maya with Vray, you’d want the mattes to be rendered by VRay. Unfortunately VRay won’t give you a DTEX image.
Two workaround I can think of:
You could try http://code.google.com/p/cortex-vfx/ if you are comfortable with Python. Its Python library appears to have rat -> dtex conversion. I haven’t tried it and I’m not sure how they’re writing dtex files, since it’s not an open format. So It seems hacky.
Another way to achieve it would be to render the geometry as a DSM image using free 3Delight for Maya. DSM images use a compatible library with Pixar’s DTEX, so we support it. But this solution is annoying, since you’d have to introduce more renderers ):
After the release of Krakatoa Maya, I can take a look at how RAT files work. It may end up being simple to support them.