Digital Lighting and Rendering

[Chapter Eleven] Rendering in Layers and Passes for Compositing

Professional productions created with 3D graphics are usually not rendered all as a single image. Instead, it’s more common to split a scene into separate elements called layers or passes, which you can combine together into a completed final shot using compositing. If you are working on visual effects for movies or television, then you need to composite the 3D elements that you light and render into live-action scenes to seamlessly integrate your creations into real environments. Compositing isn’t just for visual effects production, though. Companies making productions that are entirely ...