Maxwell Render | Official public forum

I have noticed a large difference in the typical black antialiasing outline between multilight MXIs and flat PNGs.

MXI clipped with "Extra_ALPHA" layer (fat black matte):




PNG auto-clipped at rendertime (thin manageable black matte):



The "remove black layer matte" trick works predictably with the PNG, but it takes many repeats of this trick to work with the MXI. And if you're running that command multiple times, it doesn't work as smoothly; you start getting a crusty clip.

Am I missing something here?

Hi,

I get no black borders applying the Extra_ALPHA layer that way (maybe it is a little bit tricky):

1. Open my mxi with alpha (bitdepth 32)
2. Select Extra_ALPHA layer and make it visible, hiding the rest of layers.
3. Go to Channels tab
4. Duplicate one of the RGB channels (no matter what, all three are equal).
5. Make visible only the duplicated channel.
6. Ctrl+A to select all, then Ctrl+C to copy the channel.
7. Go back to Layers tab and select Render layer (or the layer you want to apply the clipping mask), make it visible.
8. Click on the "Add layer mask" button, at the bottom of the layers panel.
9. Ctrl+V to paste the channel copied before on the layer mask created on the step 8 (clipping mask must be selected, and the layer visible).

That works for me and no black borders appear.

In case it doesn't work for you, can you send me a MXI and the extact steps you did to get that black border?

There was something missing here. If we apply the layer mask to each and every emitter layer, we are accumulating the alpha as many times as emitter layers we have (they are blended with linear dodge!). It is wrong.

We have to apply the mask only one time, and we can achieve that creating a group for the emitter layers, and apply the layer mask to the group:

Interesting, I knew it had something to do with the accumulation of layers, because any one clipped layer performed just fine.

Thanks Brany

Brany wrote:Hi,

I get no black borders applying the Extra_ALPHA layer that way (maybe it is a little bit tricky):

1. Open my mxi with alpha (bitdepth 32)
2. Select Extra_ALPHA layer and make it visible, hiding the rest of layers.
3. Go to Channels tab
4. Duplicate one of the RGB channels (no matter what, all three are equal).
5. Make visible only the duplicated channel.
6. Ctrl+A to select all, then Ctrl+C to copy the channel.
7. Go back to Layers tab and select Render layer (or the layer you want to apply the clipping mask), make it visible.
8. Click on the "Add layer mask" button, at the bottom of the layers panel.
9. Ctrl+V to paste the channel copied before on the layer mask created on the step 8 (clipping mask must be selected, and the layer visible).

That works for me and no black borders appear.

In case it doesn't work for you, can you send me a MXI and the extact steps you did to get that black border?

Slightly tangential, but that is a really slow way to make a layer mask

1) in Layers palette: alt-click on the eye icon for the alpha layer (this will hide the rest)
2) go to Channels palette and control-click on any of the R,G or B channels to load that as a selection. (visibility is not important)
3) in Layers palette: alt-click again on the eye icon for the alpha layer to reveal all again.
4) select your layer you want to mask and then click on the mask icon in the bottom tray of the layers palette. This will create the layer mask using the current selection.

Much easier

b