Traveling Matte Layer?

Deke

This may be too complicated (or more about After Effects). I'm trying to create a travelling matte layer of an animation shot that was rendered in Iray from Daz Studio. So I render character in background to get all the interactive light. Then I render a low res series of the character alone with no background set. I can take that layer into After Effects and "Fill" it with a solid color. For some strange reason, the whites of the eyes are always slightly darker or more transparent than the rest of this filled character. This is preventing a clean holdout matt later.

Is there a reason Daz-Iray renders the whites of eyes differently?

Cybersox

You really should be posting this over in the Technical Help forum, though there was a similar thread a while back that covers the same basic issues, as Iray introduces a lot of unique bugs to the process.  As to the whites of the eyes, that depends on the character and generation.  Genesis 9 treats the eyes as completely separate figures, for example, and the Star figures for Genesis 7 actually invert the eye so that the iris and pupil are floating in a transparent are over an inverted white sphere. 

General rule for traveling mattes in general, however, both digital and optical, is that no matting system is perfect and garbage mattes are your best friend, as it's usually easier just to fix it manually than try to get a perfect matte automatically.  

Deke

Thanks. I'll check out that other thread. What has proven helpful is to use black as a fill color, inverting the matte, placing this over the high-res shot, and making a pre-comp of these layers. Then in another composition I use color key to delete the black inverted matte, which results in that layer having just the figure.