Rendering in Layers and Matting

Deke

I'm animating in Daz and rendering in Iray. I'd like to separate character from setting and often render these as separate layers. There are times when the lighting of the setting demands I render the character in the set. I'd still like to separate these elements and one approach is to render just the character with all lights out...essentially a black matte of the character. My question is how to handle this in After Effects. I can use a Fill effect on the Matter layer and invert it, essentially creating a black donut with a figure shaped hole. But it's still not the goal of having a figure layer with alpha around it and then a background layer. Any thoughts?

Richard Haseltine

Have you looked at Canvasses and Light Path Expressions used with Canvasses, in the Advanced tab of Render Settings.

Deke

I haven't. Thanks for the idea. I have devised this workaround:

--Render the figure in the setting in Iray

--Render a no-lights matte layer in viewport...takes just a minute

--in After Effect place the matte layer over they render layer. Add a fill to the matte later, invert it to form the donut hole, and color some contrasting color.

--In the main After Effects composition, apply a color key to this precomp and remove the contrasting color. Voila, a layer with just the figure.