I have been taking screenshot using the High Res Screenshot drop down menu from the viewport. I use this to separate an animated character from the rest of the world.
All works well, however now I need to render a PNG sequence with the character cut out. I wonder if this is possible to do somehow via Matinee?
I tried rendering a Matinee sequence with the Use Depth as Mask option on, but no luck. Also, hiding everything in the level BUT the character renders on solid black, so no good for what I need…
Also, I have used FRAPS and fullscreened which works in a way, but I want a much higher resolution…
Any ideas? Maybe some sort of Camera option I have missed?
I did manage to get Matinee to render with a mask (with an alpha), but it took a bit of hacking of the C++.
The issue I found is that the masking does not receive any antialiasing, so the cutout has rather nasty jaggy edges (as does the alpha).
Are there any engine gurus there can that tell me how to get the masking to happen *before *antialiasing??
Also, you know that you can set arbitrary resolutions in Matinee? The only limit is how much VRAM your graphics card has - if you exceed it, it will probably crash your display driver and restart it!
I usually render my Matinee stuff at 3840x2160 which is fine, its just getting the custom depth mask to somehow activate within Matinee… then render out.
The only other way I can think of is to manually export my animations frame by frame, which is a ball ache to say the least!
I’d love to be able to chat with some of the Epic rendering guys, to give some guidance on various extensions I’d like to make. Is it possible to be put in contact with someone? I have a whole list of questions!
I would do a separate render and use content to create the mask.
ie, put a black background sheet behind the character and assign an all white emissive material to the character. Then just do a regular frame dump and one using these materials and they should match up.
Cool thanks Ryan, I kinda did a similar technique, by using a bright green emissive plane, which acted like a sort of green screen. I then rendered via Matinee, then keyed out in After EFfects. For the moment it seems to do the trick.
ah cool. yes that will work the only possible downside is any bloom might cause the green to show up inside of pixels but if you know to account for that by disabling unwanted post process it will work great.
For cinematics work, it’s pretty labour-intensive to keep adding in backgrounds to render against, particularly if you want separate layers for character, background etc. I would think that the Custom Depth Mask feature would be a better approach, but it does give horrible aliasing.
My question still stands: can anyone suggest how to get the masking pass to happen before antialiasing?