CGTalk - Render as layers

LWManiac

01-07-2003, 07:14 PM

Hi this is my first post on cgtalk, although i've been hanging around for a couple of months reading all the posts and it really helps me a lot. :buttrock: But i have one little question as well.

For a short i am making with a friend in the next couple of weeks / months i am doing all kinds of tests, how to render, light, set up surfaces etc.

Now i have this desert scene, with a quick animated ball. So i thought it would be easy to render the background (the desert ground and all the little background things) as one layer and render the animated ball as an other seperate layer.
But i don't know how to keep the shadow on the desertground, while only rendering the ball.
I checked "Unseen by Camera" for each object exept for the ball and the desert ground. For the desert ground i checked "matte object" and "unseen by alpha channel" because the ball gets a little bit into the sand. That gives me the right alpha channel for the ball, but still nog shadows.

Can anyone please help me ? Oh btw i am a Lightwave (7.5) user, in case you didn't already noticed

Thnx

Maxx

01-07-2003, 07:43 PM

If you use the Render Buffer View in the Image Processing (Scene -> Image Processing), you can select Shadows and render out shadows as a separate alpha. Or, the Photoshop Exporter in the same place has Shodws as one of the render layer options. This month's Keyframe has a decent tut on using the Photoshop Exporter.

There's also something about the Shadow Density option on the Advanced tab of the surface editor - to tell you the truth, I've not played with that nearly as much as I should.

Hope this helps.

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