How Can I Render to White Background?

[steamthunk]

This should be amazingly simple: How can I render an object to a perfectly white background? By default it is black. I want to render objects to antialias to white for use in some web work I thought I saw a setting to change this once but I've no idea now where it went (or even if it existed). Thanks in advance.

[richdj]

CTRL + F5.... then change the colour..

Rich

[steamthunk]

Awesome....thanks Rich! :)
Just for my own education. How would I have found that in the menu hierarchy of lightwave?

[Weetos]

just so you know, by rendering in 32bit format (PNG32 for example) you can render with any color in background and be able to composite you render with another bg color. that's the magic of alpha channel :D

since you're asking, you can get the backdrop panel by clicking that :
Window menu>Backdrop Options

Hope that helps

Cheers

[steamthunk]

just so you know, by rendering in 32bit format (PNG32 for example) you can render with any color in background and be able to composite you render with another bg color. that's the magic of alpha channel :D

since you're asking, you can get the backdrop panel by clicking that :
Window menu>Backdrop Options

Hope that helps

Cheers

Yes, I've heard of such things, but don't know how to do that. That seems handy. Any pointers? Thanks. :)

[loki74]

Awesome....thanks Rich! :)
Just for my own education. How would I have found that in the menu hierarchy of lightwave?

Well you could take a quick look through the menus... Its not like "Backdrop Options" is hidden in layers and layers of convoluted menus.


re: alpha channels
Generally, alpha images will be generated when you render a scene to create the foreground images. When you select Save Alpha on the Render Options panel’s Output Files tab (Render > Render Options), LightWave will generate and save an alpha image in addition to the normal RGB output. The alpha image will be composed of grayscale values representing the opacity of any objects that were rendered in the scene.

An object that contains no transparent surfaces will be rendered as solid white. Transparent surfaces will render in some shade of gray depending on how transparent they are. One hundred percent transparent surfaces render as black. A 50-percent transparent surface will render as 50-percent gray. Using object dissolve, anti-aliasing, motion blur, and so on. will also give you values other than white in an alpha image. Any background (image or colors) will be black in the alpha image, as will any additive effects such as glow or lens flare.

Since glows and lens flares are additive effects and are assigned a value of black in an alpha image, glows and lens flares in the actual foreground image will simply have the background values added, so they will appear brighter where the background is a value other than black.

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wow, what a great explaination! I wish I coudld take credit. Who can? The wonderful people of NewTek--they have kindly put this and other helpful explainations in the prduct manual!