Is there a shader for cut-outs?

PVGames

Hello! Every so often I poke my head in looking to try and find some sort of solution for this. 

 

What I am trying to accomplish is creating a number of "cutouts" for "paperdoll" style portraits and other elements. Example:

Simply turning the character itself invisible is not a solution because then you can see the "inside" of the clothing. I have been accomplishing this effect simply by doing a green-screen effect where the character is bright green and then I manually edit this out. Naturally, this is a very tedious process when dealing with large quantities of outfits and accessories and hair etc.

I recently upgraded to IRAY and noticed something very interesting - the environment floor option for rendering. It acts as a shadow catcher (which is awesome) but I also noticed that if you lower a character or object partially down beneath it, that portion simply doesn't get rendered. I was wondering if there is a shader or something else that can sort of mimic this that I can apply to a character which will essentially mimic this function. 

 

As always, any information, suggestions, tips, etc are greatly appreciated.

 

Thank you kindly!

Richard Haseltine

You could get much the same effect from the figure - select it, then in the Content Library pane go to the content directory with your default DS cotnent>Scripts>Utilities and double-click Create Advanced Iray Node Properties, then in the parameters pane under display turn on Enable Iray Matte

PVGames

Thank you Richard! I went to attempt your suggestion and found that, for some reason, the script cannot be run. 

Looking through the Default Resources (which these scripts come contained within), and all of the scripts have that triangle exclamation point, as do some of the default light setups, but the shaders and such do not. I tried uninstalling and re-installing through the DIM, but alas, no difference. I included the above picture to show the directory in which the scripts are located and what it looks like inside of DAZ.

I am using DAZ Studio 4.15.0.2 which I believe is the latest version.

 

Any insights into fixing this would be very appreciated! Thank you!

PVGames

Ok, you can forget that post above, I got it working. 

 

And it is VERY close to what I am looking for !

It is like 90% of the way there, but there is still some sort of odd skin "residue" showing up. Any insight on removing it? Thank you for the wonderful advice!

Richard Haseltine

The trouble may be that it is acting as a shadow catcher, and with an HDRI there is light coming from and bouncing in all directions. try setting the Base colour of the matte object to black, and possibly zeroing the glossiness, on all surfaces - though I think you may then lose all shadowing.

PVGames

I was playing around with it a bit. Removing all the glossiness and such and even putting on a shader (I used a dull black rubber shader) seems to have greatly diminished the effect. Now, there's a small amount of black "residue" which is overall acceptable I suppose (sometimes it looks like shadow, so it's not all bad!) -- Overall this was a success. Thank you so much Richard!

Catherine3678ab

I took a different approach for cut-outs ... turned the figure 'WHITE' [very white, all settings white] ... rendered on a white background, then in the image editor use the background remover to eliminate the white [hopefully a one click operation].

 

PVGames

That is basically what I used to do, but with green. I used an image editor to remove the green, but it is still very tedious and time-consuming when dealing with thousands of images. An automated way is so much better.

chris-2599934

Couldn't you do it with iray canvases?

You just need to make a beauty canvas with the clothes included but not the figure or the background.