I came across a job where I had some shots that I needed to relight based on some additional lights we were adding in post. As you might expect, the matte edge node or a legacy light wrapping approach was pretty limited and will only get you to a certain stage… So I found this amazing tool that I thought it was worth sharing with the community.
After being playing with it for a while I’ve obtained magnificent results for PBR materials extraction such as normals, depth, albedo, etc. What’s most important is how steady the results are where there are no signs of artefacts as you play the material through.
In order for this to work, you need to export an image sequence (.png or .EXR) with alpha channel. The AI Model will start processing and will eventually give you all these PBR material extraction in you chosen file location.
As most AI tools, you need to be conscious about NDI what does the company do with all this images. All the shots I’ve sent over were desaturated as a precomp where there was no background. Just a way to prevent anyone from getting context about what your job is really all about.
See if you guys can test it. Keen to hear your thoughts on this.
You can do something similar with Substance Sampler. Feed it an image and it will create a PBR which I loaded straight into VRay, but I believe you can also use it in Action.
That is an on-prem tool. It does use some AI, but not sure if this is a local model or if it does some cloud interaction in the background. Would have to check.
It has great tools to refine the different aspects of the material - like tiling, as opposed to many AI tools which are kind of take-it-or-leave it black boxes.
Resolve relight should work on Mac. You can get both a depth map and a normals map as separate passes and work with them. You could render them out and bring into Flame.
I’ve played around with this tool a few times and can’t say I have been overly satisfied with the results. Works great for certain shots but the results anre intermittent. Same with Magic Mask.
