Creating mattes of certain areas

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Creating mattes of certain areas
by Ben van Hamelen on Jun 23, 2011 at 11:29:06 am

Hi there,

For a 3D animation I've been working on for too long, I want to add some glow on my models. Since glow in Maya can be fairly tricky and feasts on rendertime, I want to do it in post.

To do this, I'm gonna need a matte of the glowing areas on my model, so I can add the glow in After Effects. If I'm not mistaking, it is a fairly easy thing to do, but I have no idea how. So, my question is: How do I get a matte of my glow areas?

To make things more clear, this is what the model looks like: http://fc06.deviantart.net/fs71/f/2011/101/8/c/robocat___wip_2_by_soleone-d...

The red bits should be glowing (this still was done in PS by hand. Doing it on, say, 1000 frames by hand is impossible), so I'm gonna need a matte of those areas.

Thanks in advance,

Ben van H.

http://www.fireinthesole.com/

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Re: Creating mattes of certain areas
by Steve Sayer on Jun 27, 2011 at 2:36:35 pm

Neat model!

A matte channel is just black and white. So create a render pass (or render layer, or if you're not familiar with these tools just a copy of your whole file) in which you assign a black Surface Shader to everything else in the scene, and then a white Surface Shader to the glowing areas.

Alternatively, you could assign the regular (red) shader to those areas... and assign a Use Background shader to everything else, which will knock out the alpha. That may or may not be easier depending on your compositing software.

-Steve

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Re: Creating mattes of certain areas
by Ben van Hamelen on Jun 27, 2011 at 3:30:15 pm

Cheers!

I was thinking along those lines, but I couldn't quite figure it out. It works like a charm, thanks a lot!

Regards,

Ben van H.

http://www.fireinthesole.com/

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Re: Creating mattes of certain areas
by Steve Sayer on Jun 28, 2011 at 2:54:40 pm

Glad it helped!

I've sometimes seen a technique in which each object in a scene is shaded with a different pure colour. The resulting render is gaudy in the extreme, but it's a handy way to use colour selection to isolate any object in the image for various compositing tasks.

-Steve

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