Hello,

I've recently looked at a tutorial in which at the end they render extra image planes and comp in Nuke.

I thought I would try some simple comping with what tools are available in Houdini.

Because of some issues I created a test file and rendered out extra image planes.

In the mantra node I put in “all” in the VEX Variable parameter, as is done in the tut, which appends all my named lights with same(_all) in the output render file.

I played around with with different entries of this VEX variable parameter to get a better sense of its' significance to no avail, so left it as originally done - to be researched more later.

When I import the rendered file into comps I see the seperate lights in the pull down of the comp file node.

I can use a delete node to seperate the lights.

But when I do a blur operation on each seperate light and feed them into a comp node,

I noticed that I can't see the result of both of them combined in the comp node.

Only one or the other, as selected from the comps pull down menu.

So I added a merge node and there too, the comp viewer will not allow seeing both lights at the same time.

So I thought this might be a limitation of the viewer itself, and that if I exported the result with a ROP and then re-import it again to see those results I might have better luck.

But this doesn't work as well as the ROP errors out in trying to save.

So I'm guessing it's not possible to do what I want with “light” image planes?

And it's simply something I don't understand about what an image plane is or isn't?

BabaJ
And it's simply something I don't understand about what an image plane is or isn't?

The image planes are just that, different planes. Imagine a stack of photos. You can only see on at a time, the top most one. If you want to combine images, they need to be on the same plane. Channel copy the rgb components of the plane to merge into C, the a component into plane A, and then use a plus/over/layer node to combine the image planes.

Thanks jsmack,

works like a charm now.