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  • How do you render out the background object and use it in after effects with multipass layers

    Posted by Craig Ricker on May 2, 2012 at 7:11 am

    Basically, i’m rendering my scene where the objects are on a plane with a white reflective material.
    I have used the same material on a Background object.

    When I render my scene using various multipass options and the open the compositing file created in after effects. My objects are there correctly on the plane, but there is no background object?

    I.e it appears the cinema 4d background object doesnt get rendered out?

    Its there in the RGB pass, but not in any of the other passes.

    So I tried to do a render with alpha turned on, but then the alpha channel didnt show anything? So its like the alpha sees the background object. So then I tried an object buffer on the background object, but it too came up empty?

    So i’m trying to work out, how I can get the background out of cinema 4d, so i can composite it into after effects with my objects.

    Any help is most appreciated

    Jeff Russell replied 13 years, 6 months ago 3 Members · 6 Replies
  • 6 Replies
  • Craig Ricker

    May 3, 2012 at 1:08 am

    No one?

  • Brian Jones

    May 3, 2012 at 4:15 am

    background is a specialized object which isn’t seen except in refraction and the image itself (it should not show in Alpha – did you click on the alpha layer or just look at the icon in the layer list?… but why are you using a background object? What are you trying to do? Why not a sky which will show in more layers (but still not alpha – at least in 13)

  • Craig Ricker

    May 3, 2012 at 4:59 am

    If I render out an alpha with the background object off, and then use this RGBA layer as an alpha inverted matte to cut out the background from a previously rendered RGB image, I see a step where the 2 meet.

    4070_screenshot20120503at11.56.41am.png.zip

  • Craig Ricker

    May 3, 2012 at 5:01 am

    New to cinmea 4d. So is sky the goer for using as a backdrop?

  • Brian Jones

    May 3, 2012 at 1:51 pm

    I still don’t know what you want a backdrop for, if you want a product backdrop a real one is probably best and several are included in Studio and probably in broadcast or you can build one, if you want a compositing backdrop so you can add elements in AE you are out of my experience as AE is not part of my workflow (at least to this point). There are lots of tutorials about AE workflow though, at least one in C4D help, Tim Shetz has some on his site, there’s Greyscalegorilla.com and Cineversity too has lots of free tutorials and they have a AE Power Integration Tour on the main site at the moment https://www.cineversity.com/

  • Jeff Russell

    November 8, 2012 at 3:00 pm

    I’m having the same problem. The client wants a smooth gradient for the background so I use a background object but the multi-pass render doesn’t save it out. Also, the entire image is to dark. Not sure what I’m doing wrong but I’ll do another render and use the Material Layers as well. Sucks because it’s a 3 hour render. I may just turn the background off, render with an alpha, and add the background in AE. But that’s a work around. It should just work.

    Any advise would be much appreciated. Thanks!
    (using R14 and AE CS6 but don’t get me started on why the Import plug-in doesn’t work for CS6)

    Jeff

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