Why is the damn spotlight illuminating my PaintFX grass?

[svenip]

did you also unchecked the strokes in your scene ?? i always do that this way. in the AE of your light there is a checkbox called "illuminate by default". uncheck this. this means it doesn't affect anything. now to the the light linking and only switch on your geometry.

if you still unchecked the strokes, it's again definitly an issue of the paint effects and rendering. i would then go and render the scene in layers. this will make sure that all is right.

[Faeroon]

I'm trying right know, but the first thing that I've noticed was
that if I uncheck "Illuminate by default", check on the geometry
in front of the light, there is no ray of light FX anymore.
Just the shadow on the ground.:annoyed:

I've only unchecked geometry, PaintFX strokes etc -
all the shader nodes and what ever else all this is, at the
bottom of the light centric scrolldown menu I left checked,
'cause I dont know what all this is:surprised

[svenip]

at the bottom of the lightlink editor is something called LightFogSE. if you hit the plus, als the shapes which have a light fog are listed. this ones you need to check if you want the fog again.

[Faeroon]

Ok - one problem's solved, checking "lightFogSE" did it.
Another problem is still there:

PaintFX is, as we all know, a postprocessing work of Maya
and because of this my nice and shiny Ray of Lights are now
hidden behind the grass :thumbsdow

I know this can be solved by compositing... but I've never
done anything like that and have no clue how to overlay both
images so that it looks good (or how I use z-depth in PS/After Effects)

Can someone help me with this?

[svenip]

if you wanna just render one image (what i don't expect) it would be easy. just hide everything and leave the strokes visible. and the same the other way only hide the strokes. render each time and in PS put them on two layers.

for an animated it's bit more complicated. it's hard to explain that all just by this text here. so i can only offer you that you can send me the file and i prepare it for you, so you can render it seperatly out and give you also help how to composite them in AE or whatever you like.

[sigma]

You can also improve the lighting of PaintFX by opening the strokes Attributes and play with the 'Illumination' settings. Try it with both 'Illuminated' and/or 'Real Lights' checked and play with the values. I did a project with PaintFX once, ended up compositing most of the scenes in AE for DOF purposes.

Just my 2 cents.

[bigfatMELon]

Just FYI, PFX does not pay attention to light link information. You're going to find that the shortest path to good results with PFX is always going to be to render them out on a separate pass (or more) with their own lights.

-jl

[Faeroon]

Thx alot for all your help :thumbsup:

I'm practicing right now and trying to get
the seperate layers set up.
It's a bit tricky and I hope to get decent results soon :P

*hates this alpha/z-depth/color/diffuse/specular and what ever else stuff* :rolleyes:

[bigfatMELon]

No prob. I also generally render all my PFX at 2x size and scale down in AE for extra subsample smoothing. This also lets me soften the data at double size which yeilds finer control. I find that this. along with some general color correction, helps PFX "sit" better in the surrounding scene.

-jl

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