I’ve heard of Cryptomattes a lot lately. My friend, Paul Rivera, first mentioned it to me for Clarisse and loving the ease of use. Then literally the next day in a tutorial I heard about them. And then a co-worker mentioned them about if we’d looked into them at my work.

So I decided to dig into it a little. Cryptomatte is a tool created by Psyop studio as a way to automatically generate ID mattes using information available at render time. It works with motion blur, transparency, and depth of field. It was presented at Siggraph 2015. This tool has already been picked up by multiple studios and various packages. The nice thing is Psyop has kept this an open source tool. Here is a good intro to them: PSYOP releases Cryptomatte

So far, Clarisse, V-ray, Katana, Maya, Houdini, Blender, Renderman, Redshift, Arnold, Nuke, Fusion, and After Effects can use it.

You can download it on GitHub

It’s super easy to install in Nuke. Takes only a few seconds to setup.

Here’s a Redshift tutorial that was useful: Tutorial #15

A cool update to Cryptomatte looks like their’s a new release of OpenEXR plugin for Photoshop: EXR-IO 2

I’ll be digging into it more over the coming months.