Hi, the flag I made is going into a game, one that regards the color white (255,255,255) as invisible. When I set the background color to white in carrara, then bring it into Photoshop for hacking before I drop it into the game, it's not pure white anymore, but it's close. This is an easy enough fix, but is it possible to correct this in carrara? I'm using the RGB sliders, all set to 255. Thanks, Sterling

I used to do this type of trans work... the best thing is to do it in photoshop, usually its working off the texture anyway. I never used Carrara for games textures, though I did use it for creating and finishing models.

Render it as tiff with object masked (alpha-channel for the object's outline)? Then the bgcolor doesn't matter.

I was looking into alpha channels, but didn't see that as an option. I better open the manual on this one!

ahh, that would work if its just a background. I was working with 3d games so the object was not going in as a rendering, but as an object. So the trans colour was on the object's texture map, which would be rendered invisible by the gaming engine. Its nice that Carrara will export procedurals as a texture map though, but I usually did that work using uvmapper and photoshop instead. (better results) If its a rendered background instead then yeah... scratch what I said, rendering with the alpha channel would work :)I'm not sure what dampeoples is trying to do here, though. Is the flag simply rendered in Carrara or are you importing it and its texture as an object?

You'll want to set up a mask in the gbuffers :) I usually render as a PSD file with the gbuffer mask enabled, (look under output settings in the rendering room, second tab where you choose the file size and type) but TIFF will work as well.

I'm using the rendered image, we're using the Coldstone game engine to make our game, and it doesn't support 3D. The engine is a fickle creature, I think the time spent learning a programming language would almost equal the time spent creating work-arounds to use Coldstone, but it's all for the fun of it.

I would guess that the output format your using involves compression, like JPGs, yes? If that's so, then you'll end up with all kinds of problems around the edges of things, as that is the area that a JPG compressor will anti-alias. And since anti-aliasing smudges the colors together to make it 'kinda' smooth, then those areas are no longer 100% white. I would agree with the others, use TIFs instead, set the background to NONE, activate the G-buffer so you have an alpha-channel, and then adjust in Photoshop, or your editor of choice. If this is an animation, then output as sequencial-TIFs, and use a batch process in photoshop to do the edits, or After-effects, whatever compositing program your using. Hope this helps! :>

I was actually exporting to Photoshop2.5 format, it was just a still image. I'll try the T-buffer, it sounds like exactly what I need. Thanks for the help, that'll sure beat out fixing the pics by hand with the tablet!

That's for sure! LOL! Another nice thing is you'll be able to better control how things are composited, and you can use some of the other channels to create special effects. The depth channel gives you a greyscale representation of where things are placed in relation to the camera. (Somebody did a nice discussion of this recently.... I can't remember who.) You can use it to do a selection in Photoshop and then apply a blur. By adjusting it correctly, you can get a great depth of field effect, without the render hit, (or quality loss!) in Carrara. Do a search under 'buffer' or 'channel' within the last 2 weeks here and you might find it. Hope this helps!! :>

Attached Link: http://www.renderosity.com/messages.ez?Form.ShowMessage=1116406

I posted a few thoughts on using depth maps with Commotion Pro recently and I think similar things can be done in After Effects or Photoshop. Quite a while someone wrote up something specifically for Photoshop were you could use curves to do the same thing (but I haven't been able to find that posting again). All in all, the G-Buffers are quite useful.

Attached Link: http://digitalcarversguild.com

Well I'll be, either a background or a backdrop of 255 comes out as 254. If you have the Noir plugin, you can set the exposure equalizer to strength 100% and master effect 103% and it'll come out with 255s (it'll also make the rest of the image a little bit (3%) brighter). I'd almost suspect a small rounding problem somewhere. Might be worth sending Eovia a bug report. Mik

I think i'll send that bug report, see what happens. Yeah, I've got my eye on everything at digital carvers guild, but my wife has her eye on my wallet :)

FWIW, the Eovia guy emailed me back, and said basically the same thing you guys did. Thanks for the help. Sterling