Thanks very much for the replies!
MK-3D~ Yes, my camera moves. A lot of the movement I'm doing is actually a combination of robot arm, screen and camera all together. So the reflections on the chrome ball would shift and I assume that option wouldn't work?
Samab~ Thanks for the suggestion on render elements! I'm just picking up this scene again now to play with it and haven't tried it but knowing max can seperate out these things in layers is very compelling! I will look into that right away.
Just to answer, yes I was only interested in transparency. I know refractions are calculated in max and there's no way for that to be calculated and saved for another application to read and utilized. I'm very acclimated to post work, just not 3d
😄Thanks for your suggestion on rendering the scene as it is and then subtracting all the other elements and rendering out the second pass just for the alpha channel. That makes a lot of sense! That will give me just what I need and I will use that technique!
I'm very used to rotoscoping and posting work, usually over several iterations to achieve a certain look. I'm a multi-layer mask machine in after effects because it's very easy to do. I don't know combustion or fusion but you should take a peek at after effects! It's exactly like photoshop with a timeline and has some basic 3d support now (CS4). It's layer based and is very friendly to compositing, keying, correcting and tonalizing. Heck I even use it to straight up edit with here and there. One of the best things I like about it is it accepts a generous array of formats for assets (images/video/audio) and works with them equally well. It resizes video better than any other application I've ever used. Take a peek at
Adobe.com!
I will report back on how this works! I just need to get my glass actually producing an alpha channel. I checked the "Affect alpha" checkbox on the glass material but for some reason it's coming out opaque. Might just need to uncheck trace refractions or something. I'll figure it out haha, then I'll report back!