strip rendering - file format?

[BrianKitts]

I am doing some quick testing on rendering (vray) through backburner using the split scanline options. I did some searching on the forums and found it doesn't like long names, and I was using underscores as well which seemed to be causing errors for max when it tries to stitch them back together.

 

Now that that's fixed and I can get a jpg to render in segments, I'm trying to take it to a production level and render out the images to an EXR and preserve the alpha. So far I've had no luck strip rendering to exr's and getting it to stitch itself back together.

 

Likewise I tried rendering to a 32bit tiff file and it stitched itself okay, but dropped the alpha channel and downgraded itself to an 8 bit file.

 

So my question is this,...... to those who render to strips, is it possible to render a 32bit image, and preserve the alpha channel?

 

thx!

[Ricardo Eloy]

Have you tried TGA with the split alpha option on?

[BrianKitts]

no luck on the tga. It will render out two files for each strip one for the image, one for the alpha but then backburner errors out trying to perfrom the stitch to put it all back together

 

such a bum, cause this seems like it could be a great tool, but there are times that rendering out to a flat jpg just isn't an option.

 

has anyone had any success with this in a format other than jpg?

[Chad Warner]

What about a TGA without the split alpha? You can still access the alpha channel inside the TGA.