By Casey Christopher Benn (Intuition) (206.117.79.244) on Monday, February 10, 2003 - 05:49 pm:

Having used Lightwave since 4.0 I was surprised that recently, having been using 7.5 since its release, thta I just found out that it is not saving lens flares and glows to the alpha channel.

Now before you start I DO have fader alpha mode selected.

Here is a sample pic.



It plainly shows the fader alpha mode has turned my lens flares into messy blotches and it should do the same for glows.

But as you can see there is no alpha channel.

Now call me crazy but why would anyone use fader alpha mode unless it was saving more then just the 3d opbjects to the alpha?

I tried the same thing in 6.5b

It worked as I needed it to.

Now Howard, from the gallery forum, said I could get a lens to Alpha plug in.

But, now wait a sec....., Isn't that exactly what fader alpha mode supposed to do in the first place?

I used to get these results in 4.0-6.5b.

Just wodering why it is not working in 7.5?

I am hoping it is just my computer or somthing.

I did a reinstall but it still doesnt save the lens flares or glows to the alpha.

Sorry this is long and thanks for any help.

By Kelly Lee Myers (Kmyers) (66.222.179.164) on Monday, February 10, 2003 - 06:10 pm:

Hey there.

Actually turn off the Fader Alpha mode (unless you are using it for what it is intended for).

You need to go into the post processing tab under Effects, and under "Add Image Filter" ad the "Flare2Alpha" filter.
The reason for this I "guess" is so that you can stack the Flare to Alpha on top or underneath something else in the order you put your additional filters in.

Coming from the 4.0 world as well (then to 5.6 then to 7.5) this was a bit odd. I personally think that this kind of function should be independent and per light or glow based with global function located here in this effects panel. It would also be nice from this pannel to access all the lights with flares or objects with glows and launch their properties pannels from here or see a list of them with a toggle for on-off etc, kind of like you can do for shadows.

Thoughts??

Anyway, this will give you the results you are looking of in a TGA or PSD file rendered out of lightwave3d.

Cheers.

By Casey Christopher Benn (Intuition) (206.117.79.244) on Monday, February 10, 2003 - 07:28 pm:

Thanks for the info.

Just to make this clear I have to use the fader alpha mode because I composite images in many different programs.

Now if I was just rendering 3d objects I wouldn't need the fader alpha mode as any 32 bit format makes a nice key for me.

But for lens flares and glows specifically newtek included fader alpha mode.

The image does look strange, like above where things are blown out, but this was on purpose cause when you keyed it over anything the glows and lens flares looked and melted perfectly with the background image.

Back in 98-99 I used many lens flares to reveal letters for a make up product.

Using fader alpha mode made it so that when I keyed the render in Avid or after effects I could actually see the lens flares and glows keyed properly with transparency levels intact over the footage we put behind it.

It was absolutly clean as a whistle too.

So being down the road a few years I just find it surprising that we would need an ADD ON just to do the same thing.

My question to newtek staff and responders ofg this post is....

Why would you use fader alpha mode if not for lens flares and Glows?

I know that transparent objects could be keyed correctly but they already do without fader alpha mode.

Any answers would be nice thanks.