When I said Mirage could save you render time (which you seem to be very concerned with) I wasn't talking about in the conversion to B&W.

One way that I often save render time in mirage is by utilizing 2d animation techniques with my 3d poser renders. Lets say I have a scene with a animated character in it and a moving camera. I do one over sized render of the scene sans character. and then render all the frames of the character and any objects he/she interacts with without background, as a series of .pngs. Keep the camera stationary.

I then import the oversized background into Mirage as a new project, and the series of character frames as a new layer. I can play at using seperate filters for foreground and background to fake things like depth of field, add effects such as fake volumetrics, lens flares, or particle effects very quickly.

Now I can save that whole oversized scene as an anim brush. and create a new project at the size of the final render (In my case it would be 853x480 for a widescreen aspect.)

Using the keyframer I can create Fake 2d camera movement by moving that anim brush. This is similar to the way 2d animatiors traditionally would use an over sized background, and Pan cels.

You can also zoom in and out and even rotate the anim brush.

In the end you have a very polished scene completed in less time you would be waiting for Poser to just finish render without any post with everything done "in camera". (especially if you used poser 5's volumetrics.)

Message edited on: 02/15/2005 11:18