maya and compositing (little bit advanced:)
 

Hi there,

sorry I posted the problem here, because I think th basics & newbie forum is probably the one most people look at.

Ok here's my problem, (see attached picture) I've got my object in space and various particles moving around it. I have to render object and particles in two separate passes for compositing.
The problem I come across when comping is if I render out a matte for my object it will block out all the particles that would usually pass in front of it.
Vice versa if I don't do the matte the particles will not disappear behind my object.
Masking is not an option as there are waaay too many particles. The depth matte plugin in After effects does not work as maya doesn't seem to put the necessary information in my image sequence, so I'm kinda stuck.
My thought was to somehow tell maya that it should only render particles up to a certain distance from the camera (see dividing line in drawing)

If anyone knows of a way how to deal with this I'd be really happy for help.

I'm not sure if shake can do what I need plus I have never used it. But if there is a way with shake and it doesn't require expert knowledge please let me know as well.

thanks guys

I thought that a Matte would not mask out the the things in front??

I've not tried it myself but thought thats what it would do the best? If you dont get an answer i'll have a play tomorrow.

Hi There

Just gave it a test and if I get what your after, I just set a material to "black hole" in the Matte Opacity and it rendred the particles in front but masked of fthe ones behind??

Hey gster, thanks

no unfortunately a matte cannot differentiate between what's where in terms of depth, -at least as far as I know

and you don't need to do all the work for me, unless you want to. But of course I'm not going to stop you

:beer:

wow that sounds awesome, I never heard of that but sounds like a gooood feature.
sounds pretty much like what I want thaaaaanks!;)

No Probs, heres a bit of a pic,

I made a sphere and emmited particles from it, on the left is a material with the matt opacity set to "black Hole", as you can see it shows the particles at the front and blocks the ones at the back, on the right is with the sphere hidden so you can see all the particles at the back.

I rendered with Mental ray as it now renders hardware particles.