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I am trying to export an image with a glass lens. I only need the image, not the background.
In Stager, my background is white. When I export it to Photoshop, I can remove the white background layer, but the glass portion is no longer transparent. It still shows the white background through the glass.
Is there a way to keep the true transparency of glass in the rendered image?
Thank you.
Thank you. I tried it with the black background and it ended up working without needing to modify when I imported to Photoshop.
I see now that I was previously missing the opacity setting for glass in Stager. The default opacity is 1 for the glass. I typically work with ray tracing off. With it off, when I test the look with any background, the glass appears transparent. That's how I thought it would render, but it was always opaque instead. I never previewed the image with ray tracing on. With
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Transparency of objects, including refractive index, internal color (if any), and surface reflectivity are properties that are only defined in the 3D space. The same is true of reflectivity and surface properties that disperse the light falling on them. What you get in Photoshop is a 2D representation of what was in the Stager view, including any background or other objects seen (distorted) through the glass. It isn't 3D anymore. Once the render is in Photoshop, opacity is controlled by blending modes and the Fill and Opacity sliders. Your lens is no longer a 3D object. It is part of a flat image.
All is not lost, though. It's just a matter of using each tool for what it's designed for. There are ways to recreate the lens effect within Photoshop using filters, so what you see through the lens is distorted or enlarged realistically. Stager will give you the realistic specular highlights in the lens that will "sell" the effect.
Here's one way to do it:
From there, you can work on the Contents layer with Liquify (the Bloat tool, in particular), scale it up, dodge and burn, whatever works for your composition.
Another workflow would be to create your Photoshop composite without the lens, use that as your background image in Stager, then render the whole thing. Which workflow you use is a matter of preference and how ,much compute power you have to render from Stager.
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Thank you. I tried it with the black background and it ended up working without needing to modify when I imported to Photoshop.
I see now that I was previously missing the opacity setting for glass in Stager. The default opacity is 1 for the glass. I typically work with ray tracing off. With it off, when I test the look with any background, the glass appears transparent. That's how I thought it would render, but it was always opaque instead. I never previewed the image with ray tracing on. With ray tracing on, the glass is opaque. I moved the opacity down, and now it works beautifully. The image renders fully transparent in all the right places.
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Glad you got it worked out. Curious though, because what you show is not at all how glass behaves in ray tracing. It looks like you may have set Interior translucency to 0 or you've turned on subsurface scattering or some other internal effect that does not apply to lens glass. The default glass material from the Starter Assets does not go opaque in ray tracing; it refracts and reflects as you would expect.
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I am very new at this, so it is entirely possible I turned on/off a necessary setting. Thanks for your assistance.
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Can you share any image example what you want to achieve?