How to make masks in Daz Studio/Iray

This is a quick note for people who use Daz Studio, in case they’re looking for a simple, lazy method for creating masks in Iray.

This question came up for me when I was watching Val Cameron’s Fantasy Art Master videos. He does quite a bit of work in post, rather than hassling over getting everything just the way he wants it in the 3D package. To do that, he frequently uses a mask to isolate whatever element he’s interested in.

However, in the videos I saw, he was using 3Delight rather than Iray. That raised the question of how to make masks in Iray. Perhaps it’s common knowledge; it turned out to be fairly simple, once I messed around with it. However, when I Googled around, I didn’t find the information I needed, so I thought I’d pass it on.

Here are the steps we’re going to go through:

  • Delete or hide the objects we don’t want in the mask
  • Delete or turn off sources of light
  • Change background color so that it contrasts with our scene elements (may not be necessary, but it’s handy)

Here’s our starting scene. Our character, Aspen, is casually hanging out by a giant sphere, wondering why she’s been plagued by premature hair loss.

We want to isolate the character and the sphere from the background. This is a simple scene so there aren’t many extra elements. However, I do need to turn off the floor.

Here we are with the floor turned off.

We now want to remove or turn off all light sources. I confess that I find this much less straightforward in Daz than in other packages I’ve used, such as Blender. Illumination can come not only from obvious lights in the scene, but from light-emitting planes, sky domes, camera head lamps, and the environment.

Note that if you want to emphasize some aspect of the scene in post, you can light it as desired and proceed with making your mask.

I’m still in perspective mode, so I’m going to create a camera, select it, then turn off its headlamp.

By the way – click on the images if you need to see them larger. I need to go revise the style sheet to make that obvious and, um, I’ll get around to that sometime. Yeah. I’ll revamp the site any day now. Probably over Christmas break, when I’m revising my latest novel, creating new artwork, and replacing the ugly-arsed light over the kitchen sink.

The environment is another possible source of illumination in this scene. To address that, I’m going to turn the environment intensity down to zero.

Looks like I was successful in turning off all sources of illumination. Unfortunately, I can’t see a silhouette of my scene. That may not be important as far as the render – the scene should render out against a transparent background regardless. However, it’s nice to be able to double check our setup.

To address that, I’m going to change the background color of my viewport from black to white.

Now I can see my figures silhouetted against a white background.

When I render this out, my scene is silhouetted against a transparent background. I save it as a png in order to retain transparency. To make a classic black/white mask, I can pop in an appropriate background color in Photoshop.

Here’s a more complex scene, first with a transparent background then with a white background. I had to turn off quite a few light sources to isolate the desired elements. However, it was still a fairly straightforward process.

Hope this helps someone. Happy rendering!

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