I just did a project where i had to render in matinee a lot of stuff
I believe if UE4 wants to become part of the film/TV pipeline, it needs to be able to render alpha channels.
One suggestion (maybe for the upcoming sequencer) is to develop a material, or a material function, that when rendered, it works as an alpha channel or at least a matte. so it is possible to composite masked elements on other software like after effects, nuke, etc. It would be nice if this material supports transparency/level of opacity, so it is easy to tweak.
This it is very much needed if UE4 wants to be a player on the TV/Film industry
Right now I have to resort to a hacky in engine green screen by putting a key color on a plane and keying it out in post. It’s not the most clean/efficient.
Render Custom Depth is already working for screenshots. Let’s make it work with matinee.
I have entered a feature request, UE-15984 for reference, to add tHE ability to render a video out from matinee with an Alpha Channel (Matted and/or Unmatted).
But can I also ask that the output is antialiased? I did hack the masking feature from HighResScreenshot to happen during Matinee output, but I find the the result is not antialiased -presumably masking happens later in the PostProcessing graph?
I am in dire need of an alpha output. I just got done assigning “matte” materials to my whole world (Solid black or white materials, and custom ones for anything using masked or translucent), JUST for one render pass!
Is there any update on the feature request? Where can I go to look at the status of the request, or to add my “Me too!” to it?
Really, making matinee just use HighResScreenshot (with option to output buffers) is all that is needed to really make Unreal fit into a VFX pipeline. They’re really omitting a large user-base there.
This request was actually closed as “Won’t fix.” This is due to Sequencer being developed as a replacement of Matinee.
There isn’t really any more information to offer than this at the moment. Keep an eye for any future updates in our Release notes for Major version releases.
I have just started considering using Unreal Engine 4 for doing high resolution rendering
(instead the ancient Mental Ray environment in Maya). But I am overwhelmed already
by the fact that the UE doesn’t seem to allow for any alpha channel output: even 1 frame!
Seriously? I don’t understand; what a hassle to composite.
I’ve just started to play around with sequencer export in 4.13.1 and noticed it didn’t render out an alpha which lead me to this thread. i wondered if i have to activate rendering the alpha somewhere or is the feature still missing?
Old thread but I came across this as well… I think it’s the opacity pass?
The problem for me is the motion blur does not compute with the other passes so anything but the finalImage output is close to useless. Might be something else I’m doing wrong but only the main pass works with motion blur…
