Hi all, last night I was running an experiment with poser to see if I could fake it into doing a mask render like Bryce. The way I was doing it was first rendering the object with texture then selecting objects turning thier material color to white, highlight color to black, and ambient color to white then rendered against a black background . I then took both renders into paintshop pro 6 used the black and white one to make a selection. While all of this works great it is a pain to do in poser but what I found out by accident is that the full color render that I saved in the Tiff format already had a alpha channel for the object embedded in it. I thought this was great so I tried another render with a few objects and it blends the alpha channel together but it's still there but then the idea came to render the image and then render it several more times with just each object showing by it's self and save it then I just loaded the main image then each of the others as seperate images then I used the alpha channels in each to save masks for each object that could be loaded into the main image. Anyway, if you already know this then ignore it but I just found out about it and I thought I would share it with those who didn't (like me) . Oh! I almost forgot I'm running Poser 4 with the latest patch I don't know if this works with the older versions.

heya; actually, that's standard for poser. the mask works best when you have anti-aliasing turned off, though. you might have an easier time if you use the silhouette display mode to make the individual object masks. just set the foreground colour to white or black, and the background to the opposite. then just save out the display as an image. (beware the circle that appears when you do that, though.) dunno if that would help if you render large to a new window, though.

Yeah , I figured it was nothing new to most folks but I really haven't rendered to much in poser so it was a complete surprise to me. I render to a new window so the sil. display probably woundn't help unless I changed my main window to match my render window, and well , lets just say I render BIG! . With this though I might render more often with poser it's a whole lot easier to set up.

Heck, I'm still trying to figure out what y'all use an alpha channel for in the first place. I've never used one so have no clue.

Kate Alpha Channel is the same as Bryce's Mask render - the selected objects show up in white against a black background. This makes it easier to select a figure or the background and modify the colour, brightness, contrast, apply a blur (or whatever) in post processing work. Paul

Ahhh, that would explain why I haven't used that option yet. I do very little post processing other than touching up minor texture problems or blending out creases in the model.