Hi Matt,thanks for replying with that much valuable info.
Shadows:I'd say atmospheric shadows,direct light(s) shadows and ambient occlusion
should be separate elements.
Multiple light sources shadows could be handled via the grouping feature.
Multiple layers are required anyway,probably,when working with multiple lights.
As for weighting each light's shadows isn't that in relation with the light's
strength anyhow?
Adjusting color or brightness would have been one reason,so thanks for the
tip,will have to experiment with that.
Having used render passes and compositing almost exclusively for hero objects,
as opposed to landscapes,so far.Thus another use would be changing/altering
the diffuse texture without affecting the shadows.And when combining again
there is no need to remove anything in order to avoid applying things two or
more times.
Or using shadows or parts thereof as a mask.
Or blurring shadows or parts thereof manually.
Stuff like that mainly.Maybe there are other uses I can't think of at the moment.
Don't know how much sense that makes in pure landscape comping,though.
EXR: Didn't know about the technical aspects and the resulting problems.
Still I'd like to have tiff to choose,but if it's complicating things unnecessarily
it'd be better to go with exr alone of course.
Anyone working with 8bit images has to live with clipped data so or so,I guess.
As for the dots it's fortunately only the dot before bmp nowadays.When I noticed
that behaviour the first time some years ago it would have been the first dot
at all.
When the files get saved as exr it would make sense to remove the bmp when
exr is added.
A pre check when hitting the render button seems to be a really good idea!
In particular since I came across another thing,that is somehow related.
When using a tgd that was saved with TG2.x the extra output images is still
checked (of course) and the path is still the old one,too.
So I tried it to see if the path would automatically update.Unfortunately it
didn't and after the render had finished a message popped up informing me
about that invalid path and no extra images were
saved.So,yes on hitting
the render button would be great.
Cast shadows and other rays:
Agreed,but those remaining 10% or even less can be problematic sometimes.
Looking forward to what you may come up with eventually.
Thank you very much for taking the time to discuss this,very appreciated,
J.