Getting Carrara in the mail today.(can't wait) I was just wondering. Does Carrara have an option to render in mask/matte mode. I just only now discovered that feature in bryce 5.0. I hope it does. pretty cool feature in bryce

I just answered in the other post while you were deleting it! May I ask why you deleted the first one?

thank you. i was wondering about the animation part. so i can output a series of tiff files? or can i render an uncomnpressed avi file thanks again for your help and to why i deleted the post....ummmm..slip of the mouse

LOL! Doesn't THAT happen alot! I suggest sequential files. I have had a couple of renders go bad, (sounds like a good 'B' movie title... "When Renders go Bad!) and when I've used sequential files, I can fix the file and continue from where I left off. Otherwise I'm starting from the beginning, since my animation file is corrupted by Carrara crashing! Some files won't render from the middle also. (At least not in C1. I haven't tried them in C2) If your using physics, or behaviors, C1 had problems trying to figure out the proper positions of geometry in the middle of a file, since it doesn't have the earlier data to continue from. Hope this helps! :>

I am not familiar with the matte/mask terminology... what does this mean? Brian

if you are compositing 2 images together, and 1 has a transparent object, it is very difficult to have the background from 1 image show through the other, say like a drinking glass. With masking/alpha-channels the image of the drinking glass would have an extra piece of data describing how transparent the glass was, so it helps combining images. not all image formats support alpha channels though. JPGs BMPs and GIFs don't, but TIFs and PNGs do. Try looking for the dictionary that ClintH put up here @ R'Osity for some more info. :>

The Alpha channel is where the extra data regarding transparency is stored, by the way.... Typical images have three channels of information -- Red, Blue and Green. These three channels combine to form all colors our monitors can represent. When a fourth channel was determined to be necessary, someone decided it should be called alpha. - Dex

hello everybody. after one week with carrara i love it. just started to work with bones, so much fun. anyway, the mask thing, well i'm using vegas video 4.0. my solution is to make the background and plane total white. then i render the scene with my object (whatever it may be) then i render the same scene but i change the texture of the object i am rendering to pure black. in vegas i invert the movie (the masking part) and waa la, my instant mask, with shadow and all