I’m creating some promotional art for my game. I want to render some in-game assets but with an alpha so I can post them online with a different background. Is there anyway of doing this? When I try to render the assets in blender or maya I can’t match the lighting and materials so it looks totally different.
I thought about doing something like that but in the level setting up a green screen that wont cast shadows or anything but it seems like such a janky way of going about it. I’m hoping there is a way to do it properly.
Well, one thing you could do is open the mesh and under the details in the settings section, untick “show environment” and “show floor” this should give you a grey background. The lighting might not be the same if you’re using custom post processing effects and unticking “show environment” changes the lighting as well becuase it’s using the background as an HDRI. However, they do have the full post processing stuff under the details pane.
Once you do this, you can take a screenshot, take the image into photoshop or gimp and use fuzzy select to get rid of the background grey.
EDIT
Forgot to mention, if you’re rendering a skeletal mesh, you probably don’t want to render the t-pose, so just go into animations at the top, choose whatever animation you want and pause it, move the time to where ever looks good, and continue with the set up as stated.
Ok, I just found exactly what you need. I haven’t learned how to use it (so I can’t tell you how), but it’s actually in the UE4 docs
at the very bottom there is a video which shows an example of taking a screenshot of two chairs with the background in the scene, but using a custom depth map which only renders the chairs, not the alpha.
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Ok, figured it out.
1: In the viewport next to perspective, click on the arrow.
2: Click on “high resolution screenshot”
3: In there, click on “use custom depth as mask”
4: If it turns green, great. Now find your mesh in the world outliner. Click on that.
5: In the details pane, search for depth. You should see something which reads “Render CustomDepth Pass” Tick that
6: Use the box select in the lower left of the High Res window to select the area you want, or just click the camera in the lower right. That exports it. You may have to click on a different object before you take the screenshot because it might export other ■■■■ like the move handle or the collision box etc. You can always just untick “visible” in their details.
I’m such an idiot.The documentation is the first place I checked but I didn’t watch the last video which is exactly what I needed. Thanks.
Using this method, the alpha information is lost, any suggestions how to keep alpha information of translucent material? Thanks.
This should be marked as the real solution.