Easy Selecting in Photoshop using Self Illuminated Materials

[Jonathan Sanchez]

Hey guys

Just posted up this tutorial (well its more of a tip) in my blog. It demonstrates the technique of using self-illuminated materials in max, to quickly and easily select objects in Photoshop. Hope you enjoy it. Let me know what you thinks.

 

http://cgsketch.com/blog/?p=146

[erickdt]

IMO the VRay Wire Color render element works better for what you're trying to do. It's rendered simultaneously with your "beauty pass" so you don't have to do a seperate render setup. You can use the image generated to do exactly what you describe in your tutorial.

 

Just my 2c.

 

E

[Jonathan Sanchez]

^Agreed, Tutorial updated.

Thx Eric

[abmitalia]

Am just waiting for your next tutorial. Very usefull even this one. Thanks. RK

[mattclinch]

it is far more accurate and better practice imo to use luminance masks copied into channels rather than multi-coloured masks and the select by color range method you have shown here. you will have problems with aliasing when pushing/pulling some masked colors. i would suggest the RenderMask script.

[Crazy Homeless Guy]

MultiMattes in Vray can be a bit cumbersome to set up, but they give you superior selection sets by limiting it to RGB. You can then load the individual channels into the selection, creating perectly feathered masks.

[erickdt]

I'm familiar with the theory of why you would want to use something based on pure RGB channels but I have to say I've never had an issue with the quality of the masks I was able to extract using a wire color pass. You need to mess around with the magic wand tool (which is what I use as opposed to color range) a little bit but in the end it is not hard to get a clean mask. IMO it is much easier to setup separate colors for objects than multimatte pass which limits you to only 3 channels per pass. Just my opinion though.

 

E

[AJLynn]

I was going to say something like "but isn't this just a more complicated way of doing a Material ID render element?" but I like Travis's idea better.

[Crazy Homeless Guy]

limits you to only 3 channels per pass.

 

In reality, I use both, but you can stack as many MultiMattes into the scene as you want, and just tell them to use channel 4,5,6 then 7,8,9, and so on. The only thing you need to remember to do is to generate a unique name otherwise it will overwrite itself.

Edited March 2, 2010 by Crazy Homeless Guy

[erickdt]

Material ID can't be filtered (even though there's a check box for filtering). The result is an impossible to work with jagged image that will give you inaccurate selections.

 

E

[AJLynn]

Material ID can't be filtered (even though there's a check box for filtering). The result is an impossible to work with jagged image that will give you inaccurate selections.

 

E

 

You're right, it's been too long since I've tried to do one of those and I'd forgotten how much it annoyed me

[heni30]

I just discovered that the jaggies only happen where you have objects over lapping. Wherever you have objects against empty space the line separation is smooth and even.

 

So if you have not too many complicated objects you could do render them separately and then load the selections or channels separately.