Hello all, New to this forum, and to Carrara. Studio 2.1. Any tips for how to render an animation with a transparent background? I'd like to do a short animation of a tree blowing in a breeze, to convert to swf, to place on an alpha plane (like a sprite). I've had a look in the render settings, but can't see anything helpful. I've also run a search on Carrara Help pdfs with no luck - plenty of entries for 'transparent' referring to transparent areas within objects, but nothing for 'transparent backgrounds'. Any help would be appreciated!

When you render to, for instance, photoshop file format, you have to go to 'G-buffer' and tick the box for 'mask', or 'alpha mask' (I have to remember because I am used to C3 now). In photoshop you then have a extra channel, from which you can make layer mask. But, you want an animation. I guess you have to choose 'sequenced tiff' or something, whatever gives you the opportunity to get that G-buffer thing going. If you have those sequenced files (or, if nothing works a lot of seperate renders in which you render each frame in the batch renderer), in photoshop you make a selection of the 'Mask' channel, make a layer mask and save the image as a .png image, which you can use in Flash. I guess more programs can do the last steps. This counts as 'any help', does it?

Makes it sound like I'll give it a miss! ROTFL When rendering as animated gif, I could see an option for setting black as transparent, but it was greyed out.

They have a Flash plug-in IIRC - Vectorstyle? If your movie codec options include saving as uncompressed or tiff, that usually puts the alpha channel in it.

That sounds promising! thanks!

Yes vectorstyle will allow you to export to Flash. However, I have found that the files end up being pretty big sometimes. The SWF that Vectorstyle creates is a string of seperate frames with each one being a different picture in vector format. In other words, the advantage of vector animations, a description of an object that gets changed for each frame, is lost as each frame becomes seperate objects. (If you add a bunch of objects, instead of one object that then has a description of the changes, your file becomes BIG!) TIFF is only a static image format, but it does support alpha channels. It's what I use when I output animations: Output to sequential TIFs. Set your model in the scene without anything around it and select the mask option. Drop your files into your video editing timeline, and chose the option for alpha channels. This should allow the black background that was created in Carrera to disappear. If it doesn't, try a different alpha channel option. (Different programs use the alpha channel differently.) Render out your video. Hope this helps! :>

bluetone - 'fraid I don't have video editing capabilities. I had hoped that Carrara Studio2.1 alone would allow me to make .swfs and gifs for use in Atmosphere (I have Flash Image Builder, which converts animated gifs, avis etc to swf). I guess I'll just have to forget about transparent backgrounds - it sounds way beyond my capabilities LOL. I wonder why that option for setting black as transparent (with gifs) is inactive? That would be pretty useful.