Digital Art Zone

is there a way to make billboards in DS?

I use them frequently in Bryce, but not sure how to go about it in DS….

TIA

:8

DS has a Plane primitive which you can place a texture on.

ya, i knew it had the 2D primitive, but how do I mask it out??

say i have a pic of a tree, how do i drop out the background in DS?

Thanks!

You can’t do that inside DS that I know of, most people use a PNG image which has an alpha channel, or make your own in Photoshop or Gimp or similar.

I have some that were free with Bryce years ago, but i’m sure you can still get some for free.

You would just make the Plane invisible in DS, and apply the PNG image.

ok… i’ll give that a try….

thanks!

well… i applied the image to the plane as the diffuse color… but when i make the plane invisible, the images goes as well!

You need a Mask file for the Opacity channel in the Surfaces Tab. Take a copy of your Tree image and load it into a 2D art program. Select all the parts of your tree and fill those parts with 100% white. Reverse your selection, It should now have all the parts you want to dissapear selected. Fill all of those with 100% Black. Save this new image as Tree_trans_map (Transparancy) now load your tree image to the Diffuse channel and then the New Tree_trans_map to the Opacity channel. That should do what you want.

works like a charm!

Thanks for your help!

:8

You are welcome. Happy rendering.

well…. i could render happy except for this one problem…

the scale of the image and the scale of the mask do not match…. the mask ends up larger than the image.

i’m actually trying to come up with smoke (not a tree) because i need to have some smoke *behind* an object and thus cannot do it with post work….

i have attached the following images:

the image

the mask

the image layered over the mask

the way it appears in DS.

in DS, the mask appears to be larger than the image, as is trying to line up at the top.  I’ve tried adjusting the offset, but that only moves both images.

as you can see by my attachment, when layered over the mask, the original image may have some “fringing” but certainly is a closer match than what i’m getting with DS.

any idea on how to fix this???

TIA.

Load your mask into your 2D program select all of the mask area and Grow it a few pixel’s. That will clip just a bit off the edge of your smoke but not much.