Rendering Invisible Objects Cutting out Objects Behind It?

kid_roleplay_d88bf2ef22

Somehow in a render, playing around with the Shadow Catch Only setting, I've managed to make a figure render as completely invisible, yet everything it overlapped made everything behind it not show when rendering, sort of like a cutout. Alpha channel and all.

 

For example, if you made a figure holding a weapon to swing around, you could give it a sword one moment and maybe a gun the next, and the hilt and handle of the weapons will be cut out where the fingers of the invisible figure was. This way you could, say if you were designing a 2D game, swap out different rendered animations that'd work for each weapon, while only needing to render the separate figure animation once.

 

Maybe there's someone out there who knows how to do that? I'd like to reproduce it for other projects, but I can't for the life of me figure out how I made that work...

Richard Haseltine

I assume this is pwCatch? You want the Backdrop option, as I recall, which is intended to mask out the thing it aplies to and everything behind it.

kid_roleplay_d88bf2ef22

pwCatch? Don't know what that is. Where do I find it?

Richard Haseltine

What were you using with the Shadow Catch option?

kid_roleplay_d88bf2ef22

That's what I'm trying to figure out. I have no idea how I managed to do it. The figure is masking out everything behind it and makes it appear that the space it's occupying is the background. It's a saved file from about a year ago that I just recently opened up to try and troubleshoot.

Richard Haseltine

Do you own a copy of https://www.daz3d.com/pwcatch ?

kid_roleplay_d88bf2ef22

Nope.

Richard Haseltine

Then I'm not sure what you had - perhaps a custom sahder created in Shader Mixer, in whichc ase it may be used only in a single product.

Little_Dragon

Poser 11 has a shader node called "Holdout" that basically performs this function.  I think it only works with the SuperFly / Cycles renderer, though.