Hi,

I'm creating a render that needs to be composited in photoshop. Ordinarily I would simply save as a .psd in order to use layer transparency. In this instance I'm making my first render with IDL and the Environment Sphere where I require the alpha. unfortunately, AFAIK, it's impossible to create a render with transparency when there is an object (the sphere) obscuring the Poser background. Is there a workaround for this? Visible in Raytracing? (the sphere is only being used for reflection purposes).

Any suggestions would be appreciated, Thanks.

Uncheck "visible in camera" 

If you are only using it for reflection purposes, consider not using a sphere at all and using reflection maps instead.

 

By reflection I meant the bouncing of light that is required for proper IDL (also there is no panoramic image attached)... Hope I'm using the right terminology... Relatively new to IDL in poser, I like it much more than the pre poser 8 AO, seem to be getting good results. Thanks for the tip, stewer.

uncheck 'visible in camera'. ( for the dome/sphere)  even if you had an environment map attached, the full effects would show on anything else in the scene, but the dome/sphere would be 'invisible' allowing the poser background to show. which would preserve the alpha channel in the .psd or .png.

Ditto on that. 

Yeah... your IDL and ray traced reflections just need "visible in ray tracing" to be ticked.

 

You can just untick "visible in camera" for the envsphere... and get that transparency, or other background, whatever, even with a map on the envsphere.

 

What'd be really neat is if you could separate "visible in IDL" from "visible in ray traced reflections"... but that's another story ;-)

Ok. So here's where the problem is coming from. Visible in camera isn't an option in poser 8 (which I'm using). I have 2 options in terms of an objects properties, visible and visible in raytracing. If I try rendering with 'visible' unchecked I get the same result as if raytracing were disabled. the IDL light reflection from the environment sphere doesn't occur, revealed during my test renders.

I guess the visible in camera option is a feature that was implemented in poser 9 and pro?

There is no mention whatsoever of 'visible in camera' in the poser 8 reference manual.

Any other ideas?

I'm thinking that I'm going to have to utilize a one sided square primitive with my background layer designs attached via the material room (specular chip set to black, perhaps into the ambient color or alt diffuse for the image map). Fortunately this method will work fine, Little bit of a PITA... I'll just composite the text in PS.

Yes, that would be neat, monkeycloud. *)

Hmmm... yes, think it is a Poser 9/2012 feature.

Having the camera visible background on a flat prop is your only option I suspect...

Not a bad option really though? I do that quite often now to save me making hi res envsphere panoramas just for IDL and more distant or blurred reflections.

Later...

Anyway, the final render with compositing. It's the cover image for the January RPF render challenge. Hope more people participate this time!

I hope to get something finished for it!

Plenty ideas... I just hope they're cute and fuzzy enough ;-)

Fuzzy Face-Huggers, monkeycloud. Fuzzy Face-Huggers.

errr, Fuzzy Daleks?

(If MistyLaraPrincess or PokeyDots don't attend, the end is nigh.)