Rendering with a transparent background?

cdpro_2831bbd990

Is it possible to render props to a transparent background for use as a billboard prop?  How do you tell Daz to render in such a format?

Richard Haseltine

Yes, save as .tiff or .png

cdpro_2831bbd990

Thanks,Richard!  I didn't even realize that option was available.     I'm assuming that you can just apply the image with an appropriate cutout map to a plane and create a billboard.  That would save a heck of a lot of rendering time, provided the baked on texture lighting wasn't glaringly different form the 3D lighting.  I have created some of these by doing cutouts in Photoshop.  I just never realized that it could be generated directly out of Daz.

JonnyRay

Yes, your workflow is correct. :) After rendering, create the opacity mask and then apply it to the plane. This is a great way to reduce rendering time. Say for instance you wanted to do several scenes from the same location in a park. You could setup the trees, load the HDRI or sun-sky settings you wanted, and render each tree, then use those as billboards for the scenes with characters in them so you didn't have to re-render the trees again. It would be a huge savings for anyone doing animation.

As you seem to already be aware, the caveat to this is that they wouldn't cast realistic shadows; so you'd only want to do this for background items, not something that is casting shadows on the figures in your final scene.

Richard Haseltine

I have sometimes had odd results using an embedded alpha, but at worst creating an alpha map from the png/tiff should be only a few clicks and could be turned into an action.