How to turn off background in Howie farks scenes

BradCarsten

I'm rendering stoney creek sprucevale fog scene and I've turned off background and midground objects, but it's still rendering with the gradient fog background. I want to turn the background off so that it is transparent behind the trees. Is there a way to do this? 

MarkIsSleepy

There are a few different things all contributing to the fog effect in this scene.

To get rid of most of the fog, in the Scene section there is actually a volumetric cloud object called "Fog." You can either delete that or turn off its visibility if you don't want that effect in there.

There's no fog turned on in the Atmosphere settings but you might still get some of the "gradient" effect from just the atmosphere which tends to be thickest near the horizon, which often creates a white cloudy effect there when using the realistic sky settings. There is also a background gradient set up. In the default scene neither of those is contributing any light, since Global Illumination is turned off in the render settings, so you can just turn them both off.

1. Click on Scene
2. Under Atmosphere change it from Realistic Sky to None
3. Under Background, change it from Bi-Gradient to None

This will cause the scene to render with a solid black background.

To render with a transparent background so you can put your own in later, you need both of those turned off and then on the Render tab make sure that your output is set to a file format that supports transparency, like PNG or PSD, and check "Render Alpha Channel." 

BradCarsten

Thank you so much! That worked perfectly!

I tried everything, but clicking on the scene so I never saw those options. 

MarkIsSleepy

bradrg said:

Thank you so much! That worked perfectly!

I tried everything, but clicking on the scene so I never saw those options. 

Happy to hear it worked. :)