If you ever wanted to split your LightWave scenes into passes you would know that this is a tedious process that can take hours to do. And this tediousness is equal to the number of passes you need to render, multiplied by the number of scenes you need to composite.

Janus is a multi-pass rendering system for LightWave3D. It will allow you to quickly render your objects separately, and conveniently generate hold-out mattes of foreground elements. Janus also gives you a fast and easy way to render channel buffers - such as diffuse, specular, reflection, shadow - by consolidating existing buffer savers* into one interface. If you need certain passes besides those provided by buffer savers, such as ambient occlusion, normals, and light passes, Janus's surface overrides will cover those needs.

Janus is both powerful and flexible. But is it easy to use? Users who need to create basic passes without having to read a manual can use the Janus Pass Wizard: an easy-to-understand wizard-type interface designed to quickly lead you step-by-step to creating commonly used passes.

To those who are curious and want to dig deeper into the Janus system, you will find a very flexible system that can be easily streamlined for larger productions that require lots of passes of complex scenes. Types of passes can be customised, reused, become the inheritance of another pass, and use a plethora of directives that can change parameters of objects, lights, cameras, and scene-centric attributes.

If that isn't enough for you: plugins, too, can be modified on a per-pass basis, and this includes 3rd-party plugins. Volumetric Plugins, Environment Plugins, Image Filters, Pixel Filters are all supported. For object-related plugins or settings: Clip Maps, Displacement Maps, Node Displacement Maps, APS Render Texture Maps, Light Projection Image, and Volumetric Light settings are supported.

With Janus you can speedily set up your passes and effectively manage them. You have the ability to test render, and export render passes in batches. You can select multiple passes and change their properties at the same time.

Using Janus your workflow can be more efficient: you can get passes out very quickly and with fewer user errors due to standardisation. With the Janus Pass Wizard, you can instantly employ Janus without dealing with its more complex parts. Of course, Janus is still an open system, and you will still be able to manually change pass settings directly in the interface. This gives you finer granular control right when you need it.

* exrTrader v1.2 is supported. Other supported buffer savers are listed in the documentation under the section Render Buffers.

System Requirements
Janus has been tested on LightWave 8.5, and LightWave 9.3.1 (LightWave 9.5-compatible, and continually being tested), on a PC platform (Win32 / Win64).

Due to LScript problems, a Mac version is regrettably not available at this time, although there is still an effort to get it working for the Mac Universal Binary.