Layering trouble

[Grayson]

I'm working in 3ds Max 8 SP3. I'm working on a kitchen and I'm trying to layer my elements like the island so that I can just turn it on and off. My first thought was Matte/shadow but I'm running into problems. I can't separate out the bounce light from the cast shadow and put that on a separate layer with the object. And the ceiling shadow mixing with everything is getting in the way of layered shadow idea as well.

 

The only way I've found to do it is just replacing everything behind the island, but this won't really work because of the application that I need it for.

 

Any ideas? Thoughts?

 

Here are the examples, and check the PSD to see my hack around the problem.

 

http://www.graysonchalmers.com/img_drop/wip/Kitchen/07.25.06_Layering.psd

 

[Grayson]

*Bump*

 

Anyone?

[Ricardo Eloy]

Not sure what you really need, here. What's the use it's intended for? Web?

[Grayson]

yeah, flash. User defined so that I could have the render with out the island; then turn on a single layer with the island that it has a shadow with it and it.

[Koper]

so basically the prob is that your GI looks different when you do not render the island?

 

and your looking for a way to render the scene with the islands gi but without the island??

 

or are you talking about rendering each element on its own on the 2 different gis??

[jafs00]

an easy solution would be to iluminate the scene so as the windows and their shadows don't hit the island. so the transition between these two renderings is smoother....not sure if this is what you are looking for.

[Grayson]

Koper: I was ok with that, and actually wanted that effect but I lost that fight because of what we need to do. I need each element as a separate layer so that I can turn it on and off in a flash web environment.

 

jafs00: That might work if it comes to that. but I just feel like I'm not seeing some larger concept. I tried rendering out a shadow element one with the island and one with out. Then in photoshop I got the difference between the two renders to get the shadow from the island form the window. It sorta worked but not really because the color didn't cover over the light from the original layer very well.