I’ve run into a problem getting an alpha channel for compositing from some dirty glass panes I’ve created in my scene. I need the alpha channel to composit the room seen through the panes.

I’m...

Gen, can you suggest software I might use for creating glows in post? I'll be using After Effects for the compositing.

Thanks for the clarification, Gen. I'll also consider doing the glow effect in post, as you suggest. Right now, I'm pretty happy with the results I'm getting from the mia material and light surface...

Thanks for the replies. I want to make the scene as photorealistic as possible and most of the tutorials I have seen have pushed me towards Mental Ray and mia materials for this. Perhaps I don’t need...

I'm lighting a nocturnal scene by making various objects (street lamps, neon signs, etc) emit light, using mia light surfaces attached to mia material x. The problem is that I can only seem to use...

Thanks so much for the replies. I'm rather embarrassed to admit that in the course of doing some quick renders to show you I discovered there was a lone point light hidden in my complex scene which I...

Hi, I wonder if anyone can tell me what's going on here. I've modeled a street scene and I want to render it out as a night scene, lit by the light sources you see in the scene. I've used mia...

Thanks so much for the advice. I'll give it a shot. I've already got way to many materials in this scene - wish I'd known about the triple switch before!

Unfortunately it appears that the Triple Switch doesn't work with mia materials.

Thanks so much for your ideas. Gen, I think you nailed it. I selected the objects and hit 1 on the keyboard and the textures are now displaying correctly. The tutorial on the triple switch was really...