Now, if I selected just the concrete surface (material), this is what it looks like.
Lightwave tutorials effect windows#
There is the concrete of the structure, the window sills, and two separate glass surfaces, one for the big upper windows, and one for the smaller windows that open and close. Now, what about a single object with multiple materials? Funny you ask that, because the original version of the building had multiple surfaces (materials). Just for fun, here's what it looks like when the triangle is selected. In this first example, I've clicked on the building, and you can see that it matted fine. If you change the option in AE from Object ID to Material ID, it seems to work well, however.Īlso, once you apply the effect, you must click on the image (while the effect is still highlighted) to select the material info you want to extract. I'm not sure if this is an issue with LW's RLA export or AE's ID Matte plug-in, however.
Lightwave tutorials effect how to#
I couldn't figure out how to get it to work. Firstly, there are a couple of issues with selecting objects. This is a pretty cool one as well, and needs a little explanation before getting to it. For example, if you have a landscape background rendered in a separate layer from foreground objects/characters, it's a lot faster and easier to control in AE than it is to test renders, and have to redo scenes in LW. That can be limiting in some instances, but at the same time, it is more than up to the task for many jobs. The DOF feature doesn't take into account occlusion (the colour of objects behind foreground objects when applying the blur). In certain cases, DOF can be used as a storytelling technique (or when done badly, a gimmick), but having everything crisp to start off with is much better than being stuck with stuff that's too out of focus to start with.Īnyhow, here's an After Effects DOF image. Personally, I feel that DOF is a camera artifact that many cinematographers try to overcome as much as possible in most shots. But for a lot of video resolution stuff, it's not that important. For some work, real DOF is an important issue, especially for higher resolution work, such as film or print. Now, I'll be the first to agree that this kind of DOF is in NO way as accurate as real, rendered DOF, but you know what? Who cares? Seriously. Instead of rendering DOF in LW, or using a 3rd party plug-in, you can just fix it in post. There are options to apply gradients, and other funky features, but I'll leave that to you to explore. Basically, using the depth data, you can apply a simple colour fog to the image, such as this. By adjusting the slider, you can change it's position, and you can also apply a feather to it, like this.Īs you can see, the background colour is creeping in behind the forground square, and the feather tool does a nice job of it. When applied without a feather, it looks something like this.Īs you can see, the top of the building is being clipped out. Obviously, the effects are applied to the RLA image, and not the green square :)
Each of the effects can be found under the Effects -> 3D Channel pulldown menu. To save time, I'm just going to show the effects panel from After Effects. I don't think you need to see what a green solid looks like, but here's what the two look like comped. Once rendered, I created a new composition in After Effects 5.5, and imported the image, using the premultiplied matte.īehind this image (the layer below the image), I placed a green solid, just so things would stand out fairly well.
It was rendered with a single area light, no DOF (depth of field), and is more functional than pretty. The image was saved using the RLA export feature added under the image processing panel in LW. Note: This is just a quick example of controlling Lightwave's RLA information in After Effect.įirst off, the image rendered in Lightwave 7.5 contains 4 objects, each with a different surface name. UPDATE: Since writing this, I've added a second short overview, showing a Real World (tm) example of adding a title to a scene with The RLA Exporter. I'll be doing a complete rewrite at some point in the near future, including updated functionality. For now, use the RPF Image Filter instead of RLA. The RLA functionality between After Effect 7 and Lightwave seems to be 'broken'. It's come to my attention that there needs to be a minor tweak to this tutorial.
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