Hello all....

I was hoping someone could point me in the direction of a tutorial for blending two or more pictures rendered in Vue in Photoshop CS2. 

Thanks!

What exactly do you want to do?

Well, I want to render two pictures in Vue and blend them in photoshop....basically, as Vue gets better it becomes harder on my computer (and memory) so I want to render the foreground of a picture and then render the background and combine them in photoshop....

Well, if you do this, and render 2 images, one with the background, and the other with only the foregroud, the risk is taht the backgroud image won't show the foregroud shadows....And the foreground image will still render the atmosphere.

You could always merge the images in Vue and then if your computer can't handle it send it off to a renderfarm.

Jon

compositing cna be na art itself :)
i've done it for years as often you'll find small errors, or things that need tweaked etc etc
so I may render a small area with a change to a material, and layer that over original image and so on.

as Bruno notes, however you could lose shadows, so try rendering the left side of an image, and the right side seperately and composite them?
also, optimizing objects and textures helps a lot
so does setting display options to show only wireframes with no textures applied

FCLittle,

You can render light and shadows far more accurate and above all artistically by the simple expedient of creating an underpaint mask and paint yourself. You know, like Rembrandt did.

To get started try this. Make a new layer above your other layers and hold the alt-key down while you do this. In the dialog that appear choose overlay and check for “Fill with overlay-neutral color (50% gray)”.  Set your brush to for example 50% opacity, then you can paint light with white color and shadows with black. You can also try with subtle colors.  Experiment with the opacity.

If you export the alpha-channel together with the colour render of the foreground scene/image, you can clip out the background atmosphere (using the alpha-channel as mask), just be sure  not to render infinite planes in the alpha-channel (uncheck in the render options).
Also, the z-channel can be used to fake mist, using it as a mask (maybe enhancing the contrast (autolevels or manually)), and dragging a gradient over it on a separate layer (then adjusting the opacity etc.) .

• Lars "bigbraader"