Kerkythea 2007

How to use Mask Render

Revision Date: 4 February 2007

by Shane L. Fletcher - Fletch

A Mask Render, also known as an Alpha Mask, is a black and white or greyscale image
used to hide or obscure portions of an image without actually losing any information. In
Kerkythea an alpha mask is loaded into the Clipping portion of a material to make part of a
material image transparent or semi-transparent.
Other common uses:
- place a background image
- place an object partially hidden inside your 2D image

PART 1: CREATING THE MASK

To create a mask render of an object, select the object in Kerkythea, and render it using
Mask Render.
1. Select an object or objects
- you can select an object by clicking on it in the view
- you can select an object by clicking on it in the object list on the left pane
- add to your selection by holding the CTRL key
- CTRL-clicking an object a second time will drop it from the selection set
- Select All objects in your scene quickly by clicking the top-most item in the object
pane on the left, hold down SHIFT key and click on the bottom-most object.
2. Click the Start Render button

3. Resolution: must be the exact size of the color rendering you are going to mask
4. Settings: 25. Mask Render
5. Open the image window

6. Any object you have selected will render as solid white. Your rendering could look
something like this:

7. Click Save and save it this one was called Living Room Alpha

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8. If you havent done so, render the full final image at the exact same resolution you used
for your alpha, being sure to turn on Gamma Correction setting it to 1 and 2.2 if it is
not already done for you automatically.
9. This one was completed using the Clay Render GI-Medium feature. This feature is used
to test lighting conditions while ignoring your materials with the exception of emitters and
transparent materials. In this case, it will also easily show the inserted color background.

10. If Gamma Correction is turned off, your scene may look dark, like this:

11. Save the image, in this case the image was called Clay Render_Gamma2.2
My Mask Render Turned Out Completely White:
When rendering an alpha mask for interiors backgrounds, you will want to select everything
except your exterior glass (or you will get a mask that is just a white screen).
Important Issue SketchUp Users May Run Into:
I selected all the objects in my scene. Then I deselected my glass by CTRL-clicking it in the
view, but the mask still rendered white
Solution: In SketchUp the reverse(blue) side of your glass may have been painted
with a different glass material. In this case, go to your SU file and see if this is true,
and which material it is. Then find and deselect that material by CTRL-clicking it in
the object selection pane on the left before running the mask render.
Lots of Materials in Your Model and They Are All Mixed Up?:
If all your materials are not in alphabetical order in the object list, click on Models in the object
list. When the word is highlighted, right-click and choose Sort.

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PART 2: MASKING THE IMAGE

Photo Editor Time!
For the purpose of this demonstration Photoshop CS2 is being used, but this is only one of many
programs available to do this. The Gimp is a freeware open-source program that is also capable
of this.
Warning THIS IS EASY to do, complicated to explain, and takes a little practice.
Masks are possibly the most powerful and under-utilized feature in Photoshop. This will appear
complex to a beginner user of either Kerkythea or Photoshop, but after following these steps 3 or
4 times, masking will become second nature and can easily be accomplished in under 60
seconds including rendering the mask. (It sure beats trying to cut out the image manually in
Photoshop using the magic wand or magnetic lasso or some third-party masking software!)
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
7.
8.

Open the rendered image.

Open the alpha mask.
Open the background image you want to mask in. (in this case Lake Image)
It may help to arrange your windows by cascade or tiling them so you can see them all
easily.
Be sure to have the layer dialog open
We are now going to Send the Alpha Mask layer over to the Rendered Image document.
Or in other words, we are going to copy the Alpha Mask on top of the Rendered Image.
Go to the Alpha Mask image and right-click the layer in the Layer Dialog box.
Select Duplicate Layer as shown here:

9. In the Duplicate Layer Dialog you will find the Document pull-down

10. Select the image to which you want to duplicate your mask layer, in this case its the
Clay Render Med image.

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11. This method of duplicating the layer insures that it is placed exactly aligned with the
image below. If you drag-n-drop the layer into the other image, its possible that they will
not align perfectly. For masking, perfect alignment is critical.
12. Now make your rendered image Clay Render Med the Active Image by clicking on its
window.
13. It will now be hidden with the alpha mask. Click on Background Layer in the dialog box
to make it active.
14. Double-click the Lock Symbol on the Background Layer

15. In the New Layer dialog dont make any changes, just click OK.

16. With the new layer 0 still active (highlighted in blue), push CTRL-J to duplicate the layer
with the rendering.

17. With the new layer Layer 0 copy active (click on it to make sure its highlighted in blue),
click on the Quick Mask button in the bottom of the Layer Dialog.

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18. Now, making the layer Background Copy with the rendered alpha mask on it active, hit
CTRL-A to select all on the layer. Then CTRL-C to copy it to your computers clipboard.
19. Now Alt-click the new Layer Mask Thumbnail you created on Layer 0 copy. Your
image will turn white. You are now looking at the alpha mask for that layer.

20. CTRL-V paste your alpha mask from your clipboard into the layer mask for Layer 0
copy.

21. Click the thumbnail of the rendering in the layer dialog to exit alpha mask editing and
get your image to show up again.
22. Duplicate your background image into the document as described in steps 6-11.
23. In the Layer Dialog box drag your new background image down to be under the layer with
the alpha mask. If you turn off the layers above the new background image (in this
example Lake Image) it may look something like this. Having the copy of the original

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render behind it helps in scaling/placing the image over all the openings. But mostly,
this step is important when using mask to insert an image into the rendering (see Part 3)

24. Now you can turn off the original render and turn on the layer with the mask (Layer 0
copy). You can adjust the Lake Image by making sure that its the active layer, and using
the arrow tool to move it around. You can transform the image here to scale it or rotate it
as needed as well. Photoshop CS2 also has the ability to give an image perspective
when you transform it.

25. If you need to fine tune your alpha mask you can make it active by ALT-clicking the mask
thumbnail or just make sure its highlited by clicking on it, and you can then paint with the
paintbrush or other editing tools black is a hole in the mask (think black hole in
space), so you will see 100% through black. If you paint on a mask in 50% grey, it will
expose 50% screened version of the image on the layers below. White is opaque, so it
will not reveal anything behind the current layer.
26. Now, if the design changes, all you have to do is re-render, duplicate into the photoshop
document and copy the alpha mask into the new designs layer alpha mask. No sweat.

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27. Your final may look something like this

Halo around masked objects

If there is a Halo around your masked image, it comes from the anti-aliasing of the mask
from black-to-white not working perfectly with the image you are inserting. This is
immediately apparent against dark backgrounds.
What You Can Do:
-Heightening the contrast quickly fixes this problem in many cases. Select the alpha mask on
the layer in the layer dialog to make it active. Using the levels to reduce the mask to purely
black and white may also clear up the problem. Choose the middle grey slider triangle and
slide it left or right and you will see the halo change or even disappear.
-Theres also the Image>Adjustments>Threshold>drag slider everything to left of slider
becomes black, everything to right becomes white. Slide the slider to the right or left until the
halo diminishes or goes away.
-Try to move the image to minimize the halo effect,
-Altar the mask manually to reduce the anti-alias noise.(Alt-click the mask icon and paint in
black or white on that layer)
-You can try running the alpha WITHOUT gamma correction, and saving that, as the mask
may improve slightly. Larger renderings and larger quality alpha masks may have fewer
problems with halo noise.

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Part 3: Using Masks to Insert Objects

Placing an object partially hidden by another object (a person behind a chair)
When rendering an alpha mask to hide something in the scene, be sure to select every object
that will mask the object you will insert. (In this case, we are putting people in behind some
chairs, so just the chairs will do.) This tutorial uses RPCs (Real People Content from ArchVision).
There is a plug-in for Photoshop, which inserts any RPC youve purchased automatically masking
it for you seamlessly with your image. For the purpose of this tutorial, it was presumed that your
entourage is like many pieces of entourage available, which comes with a white background and
a separate black and white alpha mask image.

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Now we will adjust the levels of only the image, and EXCLUDE the people from the
adjustment using a Masked Adjustment Layer.
.

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