Spotmask vs V-Ray

spotmask vs vray - world, normal ,vector ,UVW pass can i get the same result?
or spotmask more accurate need some info please !!!

could you make your question more clear? i dont know what you need or looking for?

i can see you do have some renderings from vray, but what is your spotmask?

and are your passes (uvw, vector, normal, ...) from vray or somewhere else?

what are you trying to achieve?

Hi michael,
thanks for your respond!
i want to pick objects with volume mask and i need the small details around the corner
i run a render test with V-Ray and export out the Point World Pass (32bit EXR)and compare it to
spotmask (demo ver reduced quality output )World Position and i can see more details in spotmask pass
so my question is can i match my V-Ray render to spotmask or there's another method to achieve that
or there is no alternative to spotmask at this time .

If you need to know the benefits of the Spotmask product compared to V-Ray passes this is the wrong forum.
Fusion should handle the passes regardless where they come from.

ok, spotmask is a plugin for 3dsmax and it renders some "magic" passes

can you show/share what you have and point to the difference?

is a little bit hard to guess wihtout seeing and knowing what you have.

Hi Blazej,
I know that you are a fusion guru and this topic is boring but for newbie like me it's a new frame work to learn and i couldn't find any info on this topic via google so i think this is the right place to ask question.


small example with comp:
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/982 ... _wPass.rar

you can see the teapot cover edge in the mask.

Hi Simon,

I didn't open your files for now but your problem could come from the filtering you use to render the passes. Maybe should you check that, at least to verify vray and Spotmask with similar filters .

just my 2 cents ...

Hi Simon,
Did not mean to offend you. This has nothing to do with boredom, I just do not think that this problem is Fusion related.

Here is the issue: The WPP in the file called spotmask has very bad precision regardless of the 32bit float exr:


I suspect that you have to change the buffer during rendering from 8bit to 32 bit float in spotmask. Don't ask me how

Mental Ray lets you chose the bitdepth of the rendering buffers independently from the output file. Did you set it to 32 bit float?

Simon said that spotmask was used in reduced precision demo mode yet he's seeing more detail in the spotmask workflow compared to vray? That seems odd. Maybe there's a difference concerning the alising of the passes?

Hi Stefan ,
you got it, that exactly what i meant the spotmask is a 8bit because it's a demo version of the plug in 3d max and still you can see more details.
my question is there any way to fine tune V-Ray (position pass) like in spotmask or i have to buy this plug ?
thank you all for your responds!

In what way are you considering the Spotmask to be superior? The low precision is horrible, but how do you know the high precision is any better?

Fundamentally, position cannot be used for masking any better than object ID. You still need coverage and occlusion passes or you need to render oversized with no anti-aliasing.

i also dont see where the spotmask passes are any better then the vray ones. if you set the colorcorrection to the same color you will see more edge artifacts on the spotmask side and not less (but this is probably due the 8bit version)

i found a great solution with mental ray i had to change the function in "3dsmaxshaders.mi"
"gui_max_base_XYZGenerator "it was #hidden
now i get a good point position pass and more...

thanks to all of you that was very helpful !

Hello to everyone,
sorry for coming too late to this topic, i did not notice it so far... I am from 3d-io, Spotmask Developer, and i would like to write here some correct information about stuff you have problems with.

As first, the crap you get using Spotmask is because you are using the DEMO Verison. The DEMO Version has "Fragmentation" so all color blocks are fused and colors cropped.
The commercial version has no such limitations. It seems people simply does not read the "ReadMe" before downloading

Spotmask is of course perfect in all it output features, and delivers the highest precision results. In some aspects we have even evolved far beyond Vray and other renderers (for example the latest complex Curvature and Thickness passes, as well as advanced setting for WPP and UV passes). Our customers do not use it without reason for medical and scientific visualizations, as well as VFX studios (those who work with mental ray).

So, your topic explanations about how Spotmask is damaged are simply false.

What you can address is something else: Fusion has a bug, or missing feature, for UV-Pass (UV MAP 3D Texture composting filter). Different from NUKE, which anti alias the UV textures when you use UV MAP 3D Filter and produce perfect results, Fusion has a non smoothed, boxy, "none" texture filtering. This means your VFX with 3D UV Maps will look awful or almost unusable, compared to what NUKE delivers.
We have been writing to Eye back in days about it, but there was no feedback. This is for example something we could notify BlackMagic in order to repair it.

thanks
best regards

igor posavec
3d-plugin I 3d-io