I'm playing around with making Poser props from Vue plants. It's pretty easily done but Vue's alpha seems to be about 1.5 to 2 pixels too big. In the picture, the two front plants were brought in using Vue's alpha image as is. Note the fine white line surrounding the plants. The alphas for the two plants in the back were brought into Photoshop where I shrunk the mask by 2 pixels. I tried one and it wasn't enough to get rid of the white outline. But with 2 pixels, the white outline is gone. Is there a way to fix this in Vue during render? I tried many different render settints but nothing helped.

First of all, don't forget that you can use the Poser props you create from Vue plants but you cannot give it away, not for free and not for money. If you are unsure about what I say, contact e-onsoftware.com. Second, if you use Vue 4.1, you should not get these white lines. Guitta

Attached Link: http://www.renderosity.com/messages.ez?Form.ShowMessage=719906

Anyway, this has to do wiht the kind of file you're using as an image... Apparently, if it's not completely black, it's going to give you this kind of results... Look at the above post and you'll get the suggestions on how to avoid this... You also have to change the scale of the picture...

Guitta, I didn't know that about the usage. All I'm using of Vue are my own renders. I can't give my own renders away? I am using Vue 4.1, the lines are the result of the alpha image it produces. Trav, thanks for the link...it contained the answer I was looking for, unfortunately it didn't work :( The alphas are pure black throughout except at the very edges, I checked 'em in Photoshop. There are slight shades of grey at the edges, like Varian said. Unfortunately, saving to a different file format didn't fix it and it still get the white lines. As stated, I can fix the problem in Pshop by shrinking the mask by two pixels. But I'd rather not do that because, 1) it's an extra step and I'm lazy and 2) it obliterates very thin lines (like stems). Thanks for the info, though.

Jackson, you spoke about PROPS for Poser, not about renders. That's very different:-) Guitta

To get a more precise alpha mask, switch off anti-aliasing when you render the mask - that is what is causing your messy edge.

Guitta, yep, I did. Sorry I didn't make myself clear, I'm only using Vue to generate the textures. zoon: Thanks for the tip. Sorry to say it didn't seem to make a difference, the white outline is still there.

Changing the size of the alpha mask will get rid of it.. I forget if making it larger or smaller did the trick, by a couple of pixels... Another trick is to make the surrounding area in the alpha mask the color of the leaf... I've had good results in that when create alpha planes of vegetation material.. Anyway hope this helps....

<<As stated, I can fix the problem in Pshop by shrinking the mask by two pixels.>. ah yes, you knew that already... :)

Hehe! Thanks, though.

Hello - just after I'd put up my suggestion I realised it would not work. Switching off anti-aliasing does work better in some circumstances - but only when you are using the alpha mask to mask the whole original vue colour render. Your basic problem is this - the alpha mask, and your pictures, are made up of square pixels, so in the end the edge of your objects in vue can never create a 'perfect' mask unless you are going to make a very high res render for the mask. If you want a 'perfect' mask, you are going to have to make it manually, or touch up the alpha mask, in a bitmap package. Masks can be made to work very well - but in the end the vue alpha mask is automatically produced and is likely to be as you see it in your picture. My advice is do it by hand - but even then I don't know how poser handles masking - bitmaps can certainly be masked very accurately when using alpha planes in vue, but I always produce the mask by hand in corel photopaint. Hope this helps, Zoon

Yes, Zoon, I was using Photoshop to fix the masks and it worked fine. I was just hoping there'd be a fix in Vue so I could eliminate a step. Thanks.