Quality Control - Photographic Rendering with V-Ray for SketchUp - page 310

Outputting the final renders
With all of the quality control tweaks in place, I think we are pretty much ready to set
things up for the output of our final render or renders. This will mean that we can then
move into the post-production phase of our project and see what enhancements (if
any) can be made.
Adding extra VFB channels
To give ourselves a little bit of extra flexibility in post, one thing that we can do here is
add a few more V-Ray frame buffer channels to our output. To do that, let's perform
the following steps:
1. Go back to the VFB channels rollout in the options editor and along with the
already selected RGB color , (don't need Alpha) and Sample Rate channels,
let's add Reflection , Render ID and also Z Depth . Our channel list should
now have a total of 5 highlighted elements ready to be rendered out.
Setting the output format
Before we can hit the render button for one last time, we now need to decide which
image file format we want to use when saving our renders to disk. To give ourselves
the maximum amount of flexibility for image editing operations, we really need to out-
put the maximum amount of pixel information possible, which for us means using a
32-bit file format (my preference being Open EXR). In the Output rollout of the op-
tions editor, let's perform the following steps:
1. Put a check in the Save output option.
2. Click on the browse button next to the Output file name field.
3. In the Save Bitmap File browser that appears, navigate to the location where
we want to save our renders, in my case, the Chapter_09 folder under Ex-
ercise_Files | Final_Renders .
4. Set a file name for the images. I will use Materials_Final (this will be ap-
plied as a prefix to the VFB channels that will also be saved). From the Save
as type dropdown, select the OpenEXR image file option.
5. Finally, we can hit the render button one last time.