ares997 wrote:
Just curious if anyone knows how to get rid of a background that has been generated in MAXWELL rendering? The goal is to be able to render out a image from Archicad using Maxwell and do sort of green screen for the background so it can easily be selected and removed and replaced with something else using Photoshop.
The goal is to develop a great workflow within our office without having a dedicated rendering technician who can spend all day within a project or application making magic happen. The goal is to have one person just sort out the rendering settings, push it to a farm, then open it up in Photoshop and do little post production (less a couple hours).
Any suggestions would be helpful.
Another alternative would be t just render your image with your selected background directly embedded in Maxwell using Image Based Lighting under the Environment tab.
You can select an image to use as your background and even modulate how bright or light it appears relative to your render, using the intensity setting and if it's a High Dynamic range image (HDR or EXR file) you can even use it to light your scene (under the Illumination setting) to have lighting consistency between model and background - and even reflections on windows and glass using the Reflection tab.
And you can of course test the levels using FIRE which gives you an idea of how it looks as you adjust the levels directly before pushing it out for the final render.
The problem I find with the Photoshop workflow is that one is them forced to spend a lot of time in Photoshop playing with Levels and Curves to try and get the saturation and lightness just correct to acceptable match the rendered Foreground which can only be adjusted to a limited degree by that point, and even then you can't adjust things like getting correct direction of the source of light fixed (the proverbial images where the model has shadows falling in one direction while the shadows in the background are falling in the opposite direction.
And even then it's still difficult to get it t match correctly and accurately enough.
In any case, this is always a suitable alternative which I find allows me to spend less time adjusting settings while still in ArchiCAD and even less time with the inevitable post-processing after the render is done in Photoshop with less flexibility.
