render elements

[digitalguru]

in Terragen 4.6.31 if I set my render elements (extra output images) to .tif it renders as .exr. Is this a bug? or am I missing something?

[Matt]

Some of the elements are forced to render as EXR. I forget whether it applies to all or just certain types where precision and deterministic output is desirable, such as the "Data" elements. For the data elements it will force the output to be EXR.

For the lighting elements you lose the ability to use an "additive workflow" if the tone map and gamma are baked in, which they are for the main beauty pass TIFF, and there isn't a checkbox to enable/disable this for the lighting elements. I don't feel great about having too many GUI-side options for render elements because it adds more variables for pipeline TDs to consider when supporting Terragen.

But I'm willing to reconsider this if you have a compelling use case. Which elements are you outputting and what does your workflow look like?

[Matt]

I seem to recall that in a recent version we made some elements saveable as TIFF, but I'll have to check the docs later.

[digitalguru]

Ah, I see. Not mission critical, I was rendering a mask (from a painted shader where I'd painted R, G and B zones) for use elsewhere and just wanted the Surface Diffuse Color. Thought it would save conversion to render as .tif, but ended just converting the .exr.

Rendered out all the elements today to see which actually did render as .tif, it was only:
tgAlpha
tgRgb
tgSampleRate
tgSurDepth

I usually only render .exr so not a problem. What would be nice to see (and since the Render Elements are grouped in the Render Layer gui) is the ability to set .exr bit depth per group, i.e all "lighting" could be set to 16bit and all "data" to 32bit where you'd need the precision. I'm still on 4.6.31 the elements are output separately, I see in the release notes for later versions you're supporting multi-channel exrs and you'd have to commit to a bit depth for that.