ID Mattes are a necessary endeavor for composting. There is just no easier way around creating a relationship between the 3D scene and the 2D representation of it. Scene complexity makes creating ID Mattes a rabbit hole of work, since there is no way of completely knowing the breadth of ID Mattes that will be needed. What if you could generate Mattes automatically, using existing scene information?
…creates ID mattes automatically with support for motion blur, transparency, and depth of field
This is what Psyop’s Jonah Friedman and Andy Jones thought to do. Enter Crytomatte, an open source tool that will create and encode the ID Matte. The tool uses organizational information that is already available for the scene at render time. These include object, namespace, and material names.
Psyop hopes that by releasing Cryptomatte, developers will turn it into an ecosystem around an open standard. Psyop writes, “Any developers who wish to make plugins are welcome and encouraged to create tools that inter-operate with the components we are providing. We hope to see a diverse ecosystem of renderers that can create Cryptomatte images and plugins for compositing applications to decode them.”
