Rendering in passes
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More digital passes
Sam Hodge: The number of passes that Charlotte produced without any effect topped out at about 42 passes and this was after a number of matter were packed into the RGB channels of one pass. Of these about 16 were effected by lighting and the remainder were utility and matte passes. Of note were subsurface scattering, ambient occlusion, HDR environmental lookup these all added to the visual richness of the final render. This was a choice to spend the time tweaking the look in comp rather than tweaking to look via shader parameters. It gave the compositors a lots of room to adjust things. The majority of these passes were as float for greater accuracy.
The passes were built together into a template and then adjusted from there. There were two main parts to the build, the subsurface look that gave the spider a glowing look and the ambient look, which was split again into furry and bald spider these could be adjusted by the compositor to suit the conditions of the lighting and the direction of the client. Of course there was a large part of the compositing effort put into getting the eye looking as powerful as they do. In hindsight there may have been more passes that were actually used but it seemed easier to produce extra data and throw it away rather than having to go back to 3d to ask for more.