Photons & Matte material problem

[zapcat]

I'm rendering a short animation of an interior scene with both camera movement & an object moving. I'm using a stored photon map as part of the lighting. I've rendered the background seperately and now I'm rendering the moving object with all other objects as a matte material, vray light material objects are not visible to camera along with the vray lights. I am calculating an individual irr map for each frame. When I render the image as a tga with an alpha channel all the objects are visible as varying shades of grey in both the alpha channel & the image. All I want to get is the moving object & it's shadow.

Is this an issue relating to using a photon map? I tried recalculating the photon map with the matte material applied in the scene and max crashes every time. We're using Max 7 & Vray version 1.45. Here are the matte material settings.



Zap

[natty]

Hey Zap ..

i take it you have gone into the vray options of the objects and told it to be a Matte object. ?

[zapcat]

Hi Natty,

Yeah, all the relevant objects are set up as matte material in the vray options.Any ideas what I need to do to resolve this?

Zap

[natty]

it may not help but have you checked all your relevant G Buffer Channels ?

[zapcat]

To be honest I don't know how to use g-buffer. What should I be looking at in the g-buffer?

[natty]

Just make sure you check them all ..... see if that works..

[zapcat]

That didn't work, but I have figured out a way of sorting it out. I have a target direct light in the scene and when I exclude everything except the moving object from the light and my problem is solved.

Thanks for your ideas Natty.

Zap