I’ve been trying to figure out a way to make a completely white product studio. The product needs to have a shadow but no background. All the renderings get printed on white paper and i really don’t want to go into photoshop for every image and erase the background. I know i’ve seen it on this forum before but I never could find how it was done. Infinite plane, horizontal and vertical plane, not sure what would work as well as what material to put on the floor.
I wonder if its possible to render the shadows separately and render the product against no background so that a png would open in photoshop w/o background.
I don’t think you can get away with *no* postwork at all, but the least you can do is assign materials to the background that have their alpha contribution set to 0. This way you have a mask for your product, and makes it not too much work to brush away everything but the shadow.
I’m still learning V-ray so could you bare with me and explain where i would set the background alpha channel to 0? When i render, would i then go into photoshop and have a separate alpha channel?
the environment background will not affect the alpha, but in case you use an object as your background, you can change the alpha in the options tab of the material to 0. This way it will not affect the alpha channel. I think this option is only the SR beta though.
What you end up with is an image which you save as tga. This format will save the alpha channel automatically. Open the file in photoshop and use the alpha channel as a mask to brush away parts of the image that you don’t want to print.
Hmm, if I use white grounds and a bright environment, than the ground is white. It’s a question of color relations. Use a HDRI environment, set the ground at color 230. Now change the intensity of the GI until you reach a white ground. Thats your main setup. Now, if you setup material colors, try to be below 230. For example bright white plastic could be 220.
There is a simple trick for studio environments with lights. Enable at your white ground material the GI map and set it to “acolor” and intensity 1or above. Now, the ground plane get light from the white acolor environment independent from the lighting of the scene.
Also you can play with the GI map color and use a map instead the acolor.
Very bussy this days, only a little bit time to read and write during a rendering is cooking.
Create a diffuse material and go to “maps” → GI “m” → choose “acolor”. If a ground plane with this material is sampled and the rays go in the empty room, than this environment is used - in this case a constant color. You can use the acolor intensity multiplier to get more light to the plane.
so by using “acolor” mapping on the ground plane material are you basically setting the studio so that lighting only affects the other objects and the ground plane will be completely independent of any scene lighting?
if so, will the ground plane pick up the shadows of the objects in the scene?
The acolor GI environment can help to bring more light in areas without enough light from the scene lights, but the objects don’t get light from the ground GI env. The ground will be not complete independent from the scene lights, but from the scene GI environment.
The shadows at the ground are created by the ground GI env and the scene lights.
