IceAged

Hi

I have just rendered an interior animation, and i am now being asked to add some more prominent lighting into the scene. I don't have time to render everything again, so i have been looking into video post to create glow and highlight effects.

I'd like to render the glow effects on their own, then place them over the rendered bitmaps. The problem i have is that as the camera moves, some of the lights become obscured by objects in the foreground. The video post effects of course remain in the scene regardless, (always showing glow in the foreground)

Is there a fast way to render these lens effects but have them hidden behind objects that obscure them? I have no time to render the entire scene again... I have read something about layer masking - could this help me out here..?

Thanks

paultwyman

Hi, would be much easier if you had combustion or after fx?

But anyway you want to be looking at using a matte shadow material to create alpha mask frames for the objects in your scene that will be in front. Save them as a Tga's. sequence. Then you want to composite the glows into the footage you have masking out the bits that would be behind using the alpha masks. You do this using the alpha compositor in video post.Sorry i realise this doesn't really explain it very well, would take much more than i can write in a post to explain fully, but i'm sure there's more in the help files.

Good Luck

IceAged

Thanks - I've been experimenting and so far so good. Normally i would use the lens effects under the environment panel but they do not work with mental ray.

I'm going to try activating the hidden 'glare' lume, and hopefully it will work on multiple computers on my render farm. But that's another topic...

Meantime i will work more with video post...!