• I have heard how useful mask renders are for making various planes of a complicated scene separately. - I would also like ability to make a mask render where semitransparent objects show as grey, to use it as an alpha map to tell how much % or the superposed image's color and how much % of the background image's color to use at each pixel, and I just said so in the "Poser5 wishing well". - Bryce 4: I just tried a mask render in Bryce 4, with a scene containing an opaque cube and a cube set to be 80% transparent. In mask render the cubes and the sky showed black and the ground plane showed white; if I deleted the ground plane the mask render was featureless all black. That is strange. I thought that "here is an object" would show as black and "here is no object" would show as white, or vice versa. Also, how e.g. do I make a 360-panoramic mask render? - Poser 4: A member advised me to "save as .TIF and use the result as an alpha channel", to get a mask render with grey for semitransparent. So I set up a scene with my pickaxe handle (opaque) and my riotshield (80% transparent), and whatever I did I could not get my Poser 4 to make a mask render as defined hereinabove. I suppose that I could have managed it by specifying "white background" and setting all the objects to matt black with their highlight colors also black; but in a real useful image I would have had to ferret thru every material in every model and prop resetting all the render colors to black. - Please help.

To get a good alpha channel for P4, the best way is to set the background to some color -- ANY color! -- that is NOT part of the image itself (strange shades of green, pink, or blue seem to work best). In PSP6, I find I often have to Invert the Alpha channel to get a good mask (for some reason, it reads about 3 out of 4 images backwards when I ask to mask the Alpha Channel). I don't know if this will help...

In Bryce, the mask render option only masks a selected object.. the rest is black.. in other words, when you first rendered it and all you saw was the white ground, that's because the ground was probably selected when you mask rendered. It's useful for selecting a particular object in your scene to render without having to bother with the other objects. You can also use distance render, which renders all objects in varying shades of gray depending how far away they are.. Rosh

I have often done what CharlieBrown suggests, OK as long as all objects are completely opaque and I don't anti-alias. But what if some of the objects in the overlay are semitransparent? Then as well as the picture of the overlay objects, I need a separate map, white for "opaque object there", black for "no object there", grey with {red = green = blue = 255 * (100-x) / 100} for "object there which is x percent transparent". That would also allow antialiasing along the edges on the render which is to be used as an overlay. That could likely easily be implemented by having a rendering option "treat all materials colors as solid matt white, no shadows or other lighting effects, ignore all texture color maps, solid black background, but obey all transparency maps and settings".

That's what I was afraid you were asking... The only way to do this is to use the background in Poser, or at least have the background for the semi-transparent items in the render as well as in the final image. Or you use filters in your image editing program to simulate semi-transparent materials on the final. I don't think there is any other solution.

Wait! Hold the Phone! If you render your output to .PSD it will contain the Alpha channel. If there is fog present in the scene it makes things semi-trans on that alpha. Combine these two techniques and you may get what you are looking for. Hope it helps, Visque

All I need is to be able to make a Poser or Bryce black and white mask render but with grey for degrees of transparency as described hereinabove. To use the result to combine 2D images, I can write the necessary software myself.

If you render your output to .PSD it will contain the Alpha channel That is in Bryce. That may work, but the result comes out in a complicated format that is going to cause me a lot of work writing a program to translate it to plain .BMP format. All I need is a plain .BMP mask with grey for degrees of transparency.

• I just rendered an image in Bryce and exported it in .PSD mode. I examined the result with a text editor and a description of PSD file format downloaded from Wotsit's site. That .PSD file proved to contain an ordinary color image and not a mask also. - My Poser 4 does not have an option to export to .PSD format, or I haven't found it.