Hi folks.

Well, with the holidays coming up fast, my Daughter Marissa decided she wanted to do some custom xmas cards using an imported poser figure for an xmas pixie.  Well all has gone well so far on the poser side. but now I have the figure elements in C5 and have hit a roadblock.  I am hoping someone has an idea.  I am using a fe different elements in the scene, the backdrop is a cyclorama element imported from Poser 6.   Next we have a pair of fairy wings which are part of the problem, and lastly we have the main pixie which is the other half of the problem.  I had a lot of trouble with lighting and scale between the different elements so I decided to do the render in 3 seperate renders.  The first being the backdrop is fine, and the loghting now works on it.  The problem is that the fairy wings need to be done in a seperate render so I can make them trnasparent, and the fairly has to be done seperately so it is not transparent.  What I need to know is if anyone has a possible way to do the render of the fairy wings with all other elements invisible, but keep the shadows on the wings from the top element (the fairy itself.)?  So main fairy invisible, just her shadows affecting the wings?  Any help appreciated.

Rich

I don't understand why the wings are not transparent in Carrara. You could photoshop a shadow over the wings and not worry about the fairy casting a shadow... I don't know how to have a prop invisible but still cast shadows. Can you select all materials involved in the wings and make them transparent? Then keep attached to fairy. Maybe post a render.

Well the thing is, that the lighting is not working well for both the backdrop and the fairy.  To get it to look good on her it needs to be set up a certain way.  To get the backdrop to look good, the fairy gets washed out.  So I need different lighting settings for the backdrop and the fairy.  But I need the wings semi transparent which means I have to render them seperately from the fairy, alone without th backdrop so I can make them transparent in PSP X and overlay them onto the backdrop seperately.  I need to have them in their own layer.  Since I do not want the fairy herself to be transparent at all, I need her in a third layer which is not transparent in PSP X.  So there is the problem.  I could make the wings transparent in C5 but then I would have to have the scene lighting set up for the backdrop and they would get washed out too since I would have to render them with the backdrop to get the backdrop to show through the wings in C5.  I guess the ability to have C5 render just a shadow map of invisible objects would be something that they should put on the wish list for future versions.

It is hard to understand how to fix the image without an image, but you might try adjusting your lights. If you are using spots (like a 3-point lighting setup) you can set their distance to just reach the character but not the backdrop. That might give you some options for lighting them separately. Another alternative is to render a "shadow pass" where the cyclorama is textured plain white. Now you will have 4 layers: the cyc, the shadows on a white cyc, the wings, and the character with alphachannel. Some creative layering (darken) in your photo app will allow you to blend the shadow layer over the background layer. holly

I have been thinking of doing a shadow layer in PSP X using the characters render and then offsetting it a bit only on the wings layer, that way I can render it without having to go into lighting effects in C5.  Right now I am only using a sunlight source to make it look semi realistic.  As a side note, I started playing around with the simple backdrop and added a pre made country out building and did some work in PSP X and it came out so well I am thinking of using a different layer altogether for the pixie.  I'll attach a WIP image of the backdrop with the cottage so you can see what I mean about lighting though.  It is going to be very tricky to get the pixie to have the same feel as the backdrop.  Very Normal Rockwell-ish.  This took about two hours of postwork in PSP X so let me know if you like it.