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Comments
w00t! you are a STAR!
(and of course SnowSultan at dA, ditto)
like you say, once you know how to do it, it's a pretty simple technique, and it's going to save me SO much time
(AND even better, it works in 4.8, so i don't even have to upgrade to a newer version of DS)
Yes, the DA resource pretty much sums it up. You:
1. Activate the Canvas feature
2. Add a new Beauty canvas.
3. Tick the Alpha option.
4. Create at least one Node at the bottom, and add one or more items to it. (Remember: these can only be objects, not bones of objects, and not instanced objects. So, you can't render V4's hips separately from her head. You can, however, render just her hair, clothes, shoes, or whatever is a separate object in the scene.)
5. Select the Node in the Nodes drop-down.
Be aware that node-based rendering can take just as long as the full scene, and sometimes longer! When you save the file, you'll get the regular JPG/PNG/TIF, plus a folder containing an EXR file for every canvas you rendered in that set. For normal comp work, you don't need the EXRs. Obviously, JPGs are of no use, since they don't carry an alpha channel. PNG is a good choice.
yeah, after my initial boyish enthusiasm, i quickly discovered that the render times were quite prohibitive, often without any perceptible increase in quality over time (you can almost cancel the render as soon as the image appears, and just use it as-is). the output image is quite flat and lifeless too, although i've put that down to the fact that i don't really know much about iray rendering at present. i'm still hopeful that i'll be able to incorporate the technique into my games-writing toolbox eventually though, as the fact that you get a pixel-perfect masked image is such a big plus
Just remember that the main reason nVidia created Iray was for commercial use, and selling very costly "render farm" controllers for it! For those in fashion, automotive, architecture, or product promo, you'll pay the $50K for the rendering hardware, and then ask what all the "slowness fuss" was all about. These types of images take minutes, at most, with 10s of thousands of CUDA cores attacking them all at once.
I didn't have such an appliance when I created my t-shirt promos. Those took about three days' worth of rendering. Yeesh!
The simplest way to make an alpha is turn off everything that you don't want in the alpha. Turn up the exposer, I ususally add a 9 to the front so I can easily remove it, then render, it will only take 3 passes to render fine details enough it takes seconds. If you want a white background open up 'Environment' Tab and set that to Backdrop> White. The other method above is fine if you think ahead and you want everthing in the scene but you probably only want one or two items and you don't want a full render for that.
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