Hey guys,

I’m doing some animatics, and roughly comping them in greenscreen footage to see if it tracks well. Easy enough right? well, for some reason, I can’t seem to render animation previews (or playblasts) with alpha.

I’m sure I use to be able to do this before in Max 9, rendering a PNG sequence with alpha under “make preview”. In 2010, I get no alpha, just a grey background, which is a rather annoying inconvenience.

Is there some type of limitation now that I’m not aware of? Is this a bug? or do I have to render in some other format to get alpha to work? I’ve tried PNG 24 bit, 48 bit, and the alpha button is checked on.

Any ideas or thoughts will be helpful.

Thanks!

I’m having exactly the same issue right now, and I’m much displeased!

I too used to render animation previews with alpha in 2009, it’s a crucial part of my animatic/perviz workflow.

Autodesk?????

- Jonas

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Autodesk may not read this thread, but they will read a defect submission.
The more times a defect is submitted, the more attention it will receive.

http://usa.autodesk.com/adsk/ser...id=5600504&linkID=9241177

Tim Wilbers [FA]

College of Arts and Sciences
Department of Visual Arts
University of Dayton
http://www.udayton.edu/
3ds Max: 7.5, 8, 9, 2008, 2009, 2010

Bumping here. (sorry if this is another “we’ve-discussed that 80 times already”, but I can’t find anything else on this one).

This also strikes me as a clear bug, as alpha in previews has a clear purpose, and people who don’t want it can just render to a format without alpha.

Any thoughts? Should it be in the Suspected Bugs thread?

Thanks,
- Jonas

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It just now occured to me that the “[smooth] [perspective]” TEXT in the preview, which so annoyingly can’t be disabled, is actually alpha TRANSPARENT, while the background is solid grey.

That makes no sense.... I mean, who could possibly want transparent text but a solid background??

The only way this makes any sense, is if they accidentally SWAPPED the values for the text with the values for the background.... and didn’t bother swapping it back.

:|

Any thoughts?

- Jonas

PS, there’s a script here that will disable the text during previews, which also disables said background:

http://forums.cgsociety.org/showthread.php?t=758578

(now, I’m a real newb about custom UI and buttons… how do I activate this script to always run?)

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