Maya Rendering for Compositing: How to use Maya’s Arnold skydome - render settings for alpha channel

so this video is going to show you how to set up a sky dome so that you can have an alpha channel in the background now I've always rendered with pngs using mental ray so now with the new Arnold using the sky dome lighting I need to work out a way that I can work with that now the advice is change your image format from PNG to EXR I'm using EXR the PNG just doesn't save an alpha when you're using Arnold don't know why but that's where it works so that's the first step and the second step on your sky dome light you'll have a visibility option and you need to turn the camera here camera option down to zero so it allowed two workers now four rather than showing the image of the sky dome light if you want to have the image of the HDR of that you've got this guy don't keep that up but if you're using this for compositing you'll need to turn that right down the rest of the video will show you the demonstration of this but those are the two things so EXR fav image format and camera and the visibility down to zero if you need an alpha channel and using the Arnold renderer this is a follow up to the rendering question I had the other day in bridge skills module what was happening was the sky dome light was showing up within the the render when you do render sequence and you didn't have an alpha channel so you had to do the one menu looking into this I've had the same effect happen to me and I found a solution though or on reddit where do you disable Arnold SkyDome like primary visibility to get the Alpha Channel background the answer if I could find that was visibility tab and set of sliders for camera turning down camera disabled the dome from being rendered and then this one here it's also worth noting that when I was trying to export with PN gee Arnold does not support the Alpha Channel so as you can see here we do have this white in the background and this won't show up as a an alpha Channel so I know that for sure what I change in the settings is - I do need to change in here what file format is going to save to so that was an important part of that post so pngs won't have an alpha channel so I'm going to use this EXR file i've never liked these because they don't have you can't preview them just natively in the desktop but actually they are the default and they can have a high dynamic range and there's a lot of benefits to that so generally I hadn't just tried not to use them but I think that obviously now we've got a need for it so I'm going to just tell it to do by certain frames on InTouch to frame one two one two so that'll save these to the disk of tests okay so that's setting up my render setting so I'm getting the right file format as per this post and export with PNG doesn't support Arnold okay so what I'm going to do now is go back and just have another look at the SkyDome light as well and the setting I'm going to change on that is visibility so down here visibility camera 1 I turn that down to nothing and that's on 0 all the rest are levers as normal and so I save this scene and I will try another render come back to that in a moment so this renders happened and now I could see that actually in the background I have these black areas so the same just so I know it's different so I'm just going to do this as a test just out for PNG I've saved that one but I'll also do a save image EXR because I think this is what you would do you possibly saving that as a PS actually I'll just check the PS PNG with that as well so if I find that I can just check it and see if there's an out for on there already and then I'm gonna go on to try and do the the batches sequence which i think is important for you as well if you're trying to make sure you got a smooth piece of work so here when I opened this one exactly what you had it does have the alpha on it so I see that's turning out white and that's representing the Alpha Channel will open that with Photoshop just to verify that but I would also set this going as a render sequence as well so I'm rendering sequence there's only two frames it's going to render so they'll set that up to run and just check that it is fully working as a render sequence because that's the ideal way of working so it's rendered my to two images I'm gonna just try and bring those images into After Effects just to make sure there is an alpha channel on them so I will right clicking in that window and import file and I should be able to select that as an image sequence so going to here images and since these two files does actually have this white showing up opening up that sequence then I can it's got this floating point plus premultiplied if I make a new composition with that what I've got is that showing through in the background so I can I can make sure that is a day I can just see black in the background at the moment but it's a new solid for the background white solid and I can see that that is appearing through that just make it slightly different just say that I can see that taking care don't using so many options just so I've got something no I don't want that effect so I can see that's in the background off completely but the other things I can do is in my project window I can change these attributes as well so I don't have that white solid because it was rendering the actual skybox was rendering with white when I did that so if I get to right-click itand interpret footage main then that's where I can change the frame rate and also I can tell it to ignore that so if I didn't want to have the Alpha Channel show up that should be possible to have that in there okay now for ignored okay it's gonna have the Alpha Channel whatever in that case straight on mat it says God I'm sure it's got the information in there somewhere remastered with color black straight-up mattered and here I'm getting this white image oh that's the kind of checkerboard isn't it so I can just see that that's got the cut out one way but that's what you want so that's the way to work with it so hopefully that's asked answered questions we can as a obviously a sequence of two frames but that should be able to automate your system so changing the camera the SkyDome options of visibility turning the camera down to zero and changing the image format to e XR that's the thing two things you need to do

Channel: John Twycross

Views: 8,362

Rating: 4.6879435 out of 5

Keywords: John, Twycross, 3d, animation, motion, capture, mocap, character, modelling, game, design

Id: Ux-3LWNnKqA

Length: 9min 31sec (571 seconds)

Published: Thu Apr 11 2019