I’ve recently discovered, quite to my horror, that putting a gamma correct node into the colour of an area light breaks the diffuse pass!

I’m using PMM to create lights and things so I can work in linear.  Unfortunately making an Area Light attaches a gamma node to the colour.  I had no idea.  And my diffuse pass was coming out not too noticeably different.  But different enough that when you comp everything together, the whole thing is darker than the master.  Took me a couple hours of fiddling to find the problem.  I originally thought that I had missed a pass… but I had all the passes I needed so obviously one of them were broken.  Gamma node you little shit!!

And thus I have to re-render about three days worth because of this.  Too bad I can’t tell it to ONLY render the diffuse pass.

Ah well, the comp of the first shot is looking amazing 🙂