How would I achieve making an object 'punch' a hole into the alpha of the resulting image?

EDI

Greetings all,

I'm fairly new (half a year of use) to DAZ Studio

I've been scouring the internet for a way to achieve via either a setting or writing a Shader (I'm a programmer so writing shaders is easy) that can be applied to an object, would occlude any objects behind it, and 'punch' a fully transparent hole in the silhouette of the object into the final rendered image.

The internet seems to call this a... black hole shader, or a hold-out matte...

After messing around with surface shaders, I seemed to be only able to control the opacity and color of my own surface in isolation.

I was able to directly change the resultant image using an imager/camera shader, however at that point it didn't seem as if I had enough information about the object I want to have 'cut' the image.

If there is a way to write to and read from an intermediate 'stencil buffer' I suppose i could write my object in matte color to that, and maybe read from it later when the imager runs, to act as an alpha mask.

But overall it sounds like I'm missing something painfully obvious.

Any help would be greatly apreciated, thanks!

-Raymond Jacobs

whitefrozenturkey

I haven't used this but it should probably do what you mean, with an external compositor:

http://www.daz3d.com/surface-mask-creator-for-ds

fixmypcmike

Unfortunately, that product was never updated for DS4.

EDI

I saw that product in my various searching; though using an external compositor wouldn't really be ideal for what I'm trying to achieve.