Relighting footage usually sounds like something reserved for heavy compositing pipelines, custom scans, or full CG workflows. VFX Passes changes that by turning ordinary footage into usable VFX utility passes that can be pushed inside tools like Unreal Engine, Blender, and After Effects.
The idea is simple. Feed the software an image, a video, or an image sequence, and it generates key passes such as albedo, normal, specular, and depth. Those passes give you more control over how a shot reacts to light and how it blends into a 3D scene.
What VFX Passes generates
VFX Passes breaks footage down into practical outputs that are ready for creative work. The main passes are:
- Albedo, which represents the underlying color information with lighting influence reduced.
- Normal map, which adds surface direction data so light can react more convincingly.
- Specular, which helps define highlight response and reflective behavior.
- Depth map, a grayscale distance map for depth-based effects, placement, and compositing.
The tool is especially focused on producing strong normal maps, since that pass does much of the heavy lifting when you want believable relighting.
Start here
Use the pages in this section to move through the workflow in order: install the app, load footage, choose output passes, process the sequence, then bring the maps into Unreal Engine or another compositing tool.
