By the way, if any of you get into Modo's render passes, you need to be
sure you understand what they are. The first thing you want to do is to
turn off 'Auto-Add'. Just do it. Otherwise you'll shoot yourself later,
once you understand what passes are....
So .... Passes.....
In Modo, parameters are called 'channels'. You change a value anywhere,
and you've changed a channel. /Passes are containers for channel
values/. You need to let that sink in. */Passes are containers for
channel values/*. This means that you could very well have a camera
animated one way in Pass A, and the same camera animated in a totally
different way in Pass B. This is fundamentally different to how XSI does
things. Now the workflow for doing overrides and partitioning is not as
fluid as it is in Soft (and I've opened bugs in the bug tracking system
for this), but you need to recognize the raw power behind what the
system offers: on a per-pass basis, you can store completely different
values for parameters.
Now... if you have Auto-Add on.... and you're in a pass... any changes
you make to channels (move a camera, tweak a light) get stored ONLY IN
THAT PASS. Coming from XSI, you're accostumed to moving the camera
around and it be the same camera position for all passes. But since
Modo's passes are containers for unique channel values, you can have the
camera be in a different place entirely depending on the pass. And if
you have Auto-Add on, your work will only be local to that pass! You can
always push the changes from that pass back to the default state, but
it's better to just disable Auto-Add in the first place.
-Tim
