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Hi. I'm a new user to 3d graphics and have been using Strata Studio Pro 2.5.5 for about a month. I'm a little in the dark when it comes to making masks... I can animate and make 36 different little pics of the ship I made, but don't know how to mask them so I can use the ship in a plug. I've got mostly all of the good graphics programs (like Photoshop) but just don't know how to use them well.
Thanks, Majordomo Commander of the guard.
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With photoshop...apply a threshold of 1 or something and that'll make you a mask...
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or you could make a spin graphic with all 36 frames, open it in photoshop, use the magic wand tool, select the black areas, and copy, paste into a new document, save as pict, and you have a mask
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I was thinking that you did it by rendering the spin again with a background colour that isn't used in the actual ship, then selecting that colour in Photoshop and making it black. How does that work?
Majordomo Commander of the guard.
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Originally posted by Majordomo: **I was thinking that you did it by rendering the spin again with a background colour that isn't used in the actual ship, then selecting that colour in Photoshop and making it black. How does that work?
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you could do that too, with photoshop... how i said above, but just change the color in the new doc with paint bucket or whatever (make sure anti-aliasing is off)
Majordomo, your method is also how I make masks. I render the ship once with a black background, and then once with a background that is radically different from the ship's color. Then (in the drawing/painting/photoshopping application of your choice) I would use the magic wand thingie on the radically different color, drag it over there, and fill it (the color, not the hole you create by dragging!) in with black.
This method is especially useful if you have very dark, large ships that, when you can see holes punched in them when they are over planets, lose their menace. (Look, I can see through the cockpit onto the surface of Ursa Minor Beta!)
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(This message has been edited by Mr. S'pht (edited 12-24-2000).)
Actually, if you're rendering it twice anyway, why don't you just put the two renderings with different background colors on top of each other and make a difference layer? this would give you a far more precise result then the magic wand ever could, plus it would also be good for stuff like holes in the center of the ship, etc...
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What I do is render the ship once the way I want it to look. Then I copy the file, turn the ambient light up as high as it will go, and set the background to black. I also turn all the objects in the scene white. This effectively causes the rendering program to create a perfect mask, if I render with the same settings as before.
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Originally posted by Majordomo: **Hi. I'm a new user to 3d graphics and have been using Strata Studio Pro 2.5.5 for about a month. I'm a little in the dark when it comes to making masks... I can animate and make 36 different little pics of the ship I made, but don't know how to mask them so I can use the ship in a plug. I've got mostly all of the good graphics programs (like Photoshop) but just don't know how to use them well.
Render alpha channels. There is a checkmark to do this in the "Render" dialog. Than when you open up the document in photoshop, you'll have your mask saved as a Alpha Channel.
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