Rendering the alpha channel in Blender

I know most of you don't use blender, but I need to know how to render an AVI raw file with the alpha channel.

Thanks!



PS- I'm posting here because Blender's site is temporarily down.



-ZZZ

 

You should be able to render an .avi with the animation codec and set it to rgb+a...

But I have no idea if blender can support this. BTW, it is a really bad idea to render in movie formats (.avi, .mov, .mpeg) you should always render to .tga or .tif and then make your movie when al the frames are rendering. If you have a power outage or your computer freezes up mid render, all the previous render time will be lost. When rendering individual images, you will only lose one frame.

 

I seem to remember this being brought up in the blenderwars.com forums. Might wanna check there.

 

I set it to RGB+A, but when I import it into AE, there's no Alpha channel. And could someone explain to me how to make use of Targa files?


Drippyzeo, as of right now, the site is down.





-ZZZ

 

You just render the sequence out as .tga files and then in AE import the sequence. Then bring the sequence into a composition and you should be able export a .avi from that.

 

Drippyzeo, as of right now, the site is down.

Oh...when you said Blender's site was down, I thought you were talking about the official site, Blender3d.org. Nice place to snoop around for answers, too.

Incidentally, I did a Google search for "blender 'alpha channel'", and found an answer in the first 5 results. Basically, do what PapaFett said: render as Targa, then load the sequence into AE. Since I don't have AE, I'm not sure how to do that second part, but the first part is straightforward since Targa is the default render setting for Blender.

EDIT: Alternatively, render the scene once, then set the material colors for what you want an alpha channel for to white (R = 1, G = 1, B = 1, Emit = 1). Then re-render only those objects. A little more complicated, but at least you get to render as an AVI.