Eric2575

Thanks again guys, both ideas will work and I will try them both to see which fits the bill better.

I've got a simple scene with a central object receiving reflections from a dome that has an HDRI image applied via a projection map. It renders very nicely, but I want to use an alpha channel to composite the object into another scene without the dome background. I tried tga output with the alpha channel enabled, but the resultant alpha is the whole tga, not just the central object. What am I missing here?

Well, that gives me quite a bit to play with, thanks guys.

A long time ago I seem to remember a thread that talked about blurring an object in motion. The trick was to have the middle to back of the object blurred with a trail in it's wake, but the front of the object was not blurred. Imagine a car or plane or fist in motion with the leading edge in focus and blurring the image as it goes by. I hope I'm explaining this right? MUFOOF may have been used, but I don't recall. Does anyone remember how to do this? Here is a pic that shows what I mean: Front relatively in focus as the rear blurs out inot the blurry background.

Fake AO dome? I'd like to give that a try.

Wanted to add the tga. Ivy_trio_86.zip

Thank you both for looking into this with me. Off to work I go, but when I get back, I'll check out all of your suggestions.

To be honest, I forgot to turn multipass off this morning when I set the render. In any case, isn't it taking a bit too long for the hair to render?

No, the improvement isn't that drastic - initially 16 passes at one hour per pass, now 16 passes at 25 minutes per pass. There must be something wrong somewhere - a render without hair averages about 6 minutes now, but the hair only render with an alpha channel just finished rendering after 7 hours and 35 minutes at 28:30 minutes per render for 16 passes. Here is the TGA of the vines that took so long. Is this normal? Btw, my computer is an Intel Core 2 Duo 6600 @ 2.40 GHz running Win XP SP2 with 2 GB of Ram running AM 15.0i. Had to convert the TGA to a jpg for uploading.

Well, I exchanged the three sun lights with kliegs and made sure that only one of them cast z-buffered shadows. A 1000x750 render still took 20 minutes with hair enabled for a single frame. Without hair it took 6:24. That's quite an improvement for the hair render. I'll try rendering the hair out separately next. Also, maybe I should rethink my hair model?

Thanks guys, that will get me going again. First I'll change the suns to kliegs...

I'll have to check on that. I know I am using only three lights, all suns with only one casting shadows. It's an outdoor scene of an alley shot with IBL and the suns.

I have a scene with many objects in it that is taking about 7 minutes per frame to render without hair. When I enable hair to render, the time goes up to over an hour per frame. The density of the hair material isn't the problem, it's down to about 3%, it's the fact that there is a lot of hair in the scene. I created a vine running over most of one wall that is causing the slowdown. So now I'm thinking I could render the scene without hair and then render out the hair separately, then composite them together. I just don't know if this is possible, and if so, how to do it? I don't want to wait 16 passes at over an hour a piece to see that I will likely have to change something anyway. Thanks for any help on this. Eric

I'm working on a scene that has quite a bit of hair in it. The hair is actually leaves, ivy that is hanging on a wall. Can I render that out separately, and what about the shadows the leaves cast on the wall? Eric

Very nice, looks good.