Is it possible to turn a TV surface "checkerboard" transparent during render?

NorrinRadd22_5694f0872b

I need to put an image on a TV screen after render, but there is dust and godrays in front of the TV screen. I need to find a way to make it so the TV screen is universally transparent so in Photoshop I can just slide in whatever image I want and have the dust and godrays still be in front of it. I need to do this often for thumbnails, so while it would look better to make it an immesive texture on the TV, I would rather just be able to do it in photoshop if possible.

The snag is, that TV is in a room, and I can't just delete the wall behind it. I need the surface of the TV to render so that it is a checkerboard transparent space, even though there are still props and architecture behind it. Just as I would if there were no dust or godrays in front of it. I can't crop it out in photoshop right now because I will be cropping the dust and godrays and that would not look good at all.

In the past I have used a transparent section plane, which works good as long as I don't have anything behind my subject. But in this case I do!

Any ideas?

Richard Haseltine

You should be able to do it with canvasses, or you could use the Geometry Editor to split the screen and TV into two separate objects, then /Scripts/Utilities/Create Advanced Iray Node Properties  with th screen selected and turn on the Iray Matte in Parameters.

NorrinRadd22_5694f0872b

Good suggestions. I'll investigate. A couple quick questions though:

1. In 4.20 have they removed the scripts function or something? I haven't seen it in the top menu for a while come to think of it.

2. Never heard of canvasses before, any chance I could get a quick breakdown?

Richard Haseltine

1. You may have lost your layout customisation in 4.20.0.3 (I think) when they were not saving - at least if there was no previous layout. The feature is still there and should work.

NorrinRadd22_5694f0872b

Had to do a lot of research, but I figured it out!

For anyone rsearching this in the future, the details were that I had to make two objects, using edit > duplicate, and then use the Geometry Editor script to delete parts to create two separate objects. One for a screen and one for a frame. Also, a handy piece of advice is that you need to toggle off then back on the Iray rendering in the preview in order to actually have it register and do something when you toggle it on in the first place.

Thanks for the help, Richard! This one had been doggin' me for literally years.

Brycescaper

Interesting topic. I have the G8 Sedor phone and I have created a way to do selfies using .png renders  of the scene from the phone's POV using the screen ratio, gone into textures VIA the surfaces plane, duplicated the original screen surface, and photoshopped the selfie image of the same size and aspect ratio over the screen, and saved it as a seperate  surface and that has worked. It saves the custom screen image for that scene as a seperate surface, but it is a quick cheat.. I also have the karaoke set and am planning to do the same, replace the default screen with screenshots of actual karaoke song screenshots. I use Panoramic Studio to create scrolling 360-degree renders using the spherical lens, and I have images of multiple people taking selfies, their phone each showing what the phone's camera sees as I render and save each phone's modified screens as a seperate texture. It doesn't affect any surfaces around or behind the phone, and although the customized texture files accumulate, they can be re-used, say as in a different scene where the person with the phone is showing the selfie or whatever image the phone captures to another person using the same texture saved. The images below are the original screen texture (actually a duplicate and renamed 'template image), the scene-specific remaned texture, and the custom screen. I use MS paint so the last image is a jpg file, the other two are .png to enable adding the selfie image as a separate layer than merging them. The renamed template texture for each image must be different than the original as you can re-use it for other selfies from the same figure. I initially create a master template  seperate from the original (left image), then 'save as' the screen using the selfie screen name. When I use paint to merge the images I save as a .JPG file of the same name. Anyway, any device with a screen can be customized to show any scene rendered to the device screen's aspect ratio and size.  

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