Part 2: Feeding external normal maps into the Relight ResolveFX

The big headline with the new Relight ResolveFX was obviously its machine learning capability. Like magic, Relight can extrapolate rough geometry from an image and use that geometry to drive relighting tools.

In Part One – you learned how the Relight effect works, and how to optimize its use by separating the machine learning-based surface map generator from the relight matte generation. This allows you to get more real-time interactions while using this plugin.

In this Insight – we take that separation a step further and input the Relight effect using existing geometry. You can do this if you:

• Have CGI renders
• Are creating 3D within Fusion
• Have rendered animations

The above workflows can provide a normals pass. Normals give Relight the surface information it needs to work — bypassing the GPU-heavy machine learning analysis — and it will always have perfect accuracy compared to Relight’s surface estimations.

Key takeaways from this Insight

By the end of this Insight, you should understand how to:

• Generate Normals passes in Fusion from a 3D scene
• Understand how Fusion routes multiple render passes in a single “pipe”
• Convert normals to RGB for color page use
• Use Relight on the color page to grade fusion-made 3D scenes
• Bring in a multipass EXR from a CGI render
• Expose and route the normals, and alpha to the color page
• Adjust the normals in Relight to suit its expected input
• Relight a rendered CGI scene