Figure masking?

vonHobo

I need some help please.

I want to create a zombie with an overlay of smoke, but I want the smoke effect to only appear on the zombie, not the background.

The background needs to remain transparent (no smoke) because this will be for a t-shirt printing.

So I have the zombie figure and the smoke effect products. 

Is there a way to make the smoke plane only effect the figure and not overlay the background?

I suppose I could get rid of the smoke surrounding the zombie in Photoshop after rendering the image, but I was hoping there was a way to do this directly in DAZ Studio, without postwork.

I was hoping there was a way to mask areas in the DAZ scene so that they do not pick up the effects being applied. For example, if I could put a mask over everything except the figure itself, before applying the smoke effect?

I hope I'm explaining this right (see attached render with smoke on entire scene, not just the figure).

 

Richard Haseltine

The simplst method would be to do a second render, even a 3Delight render with very basic lighting, of just the figure and save as a PNG or Tiff - that would have an alpha channel which you could use to isolate the zombie-with-smoke from the main render. You can also use Canvasses with iray (Advanced tab of Render Settings) to create a mask, but I suspect the separate render may be quicker.

vonHobo

Thanks Richard! I will start with the suggestions you made and go from there. Much appreciated!