OK, I've finally gotten fully involved with PV360. Though I don't like that I cannot tweak a scene or material, the renderings themselves are quite clean and they set up quickly. But I have some questions after producing some renderings I needed to process later with Photoshop:
1) How do I get a shadow to fall across a floor, while not explicitly showing the floor and environment? If you see my web site, this is the general format I've used for my renderings when I used PhotoWorks (which is now hopelessly broken), and I'd like to mimic these results if possible. I noticed if I select the option to hide the environment, my shadow also disappears. (I don't really want a glossy floor--only a shadow.)
2) When I save a rendering to PNG or TIFF (formats which have alpha channels for transparent backgrounds), the rendering nonetheless renders the background as solid black and not transparent. Is there a way to change this? I'd prefer white over black, and transparent over anything. I don't see any options anywhere to specify this properly.
I appreciate any help with this. Thanks!
You almost always want to render your final image (if you want a floor shadow) with the environment set to not show (unchecked box). If you don't you'll find the shadow picks up the environment color and when the image is overlayed on a colored background the shadow is actually white rather than black (dark gray).
I always save my images as tiff (most of my clients specify this) and the alpha channel is included so removing the background is easy.
There are some videos at my site www.robrodriguez.com and www.solidgallery.com that cover some of the new stuff in 2010. You may have seen these already. 2011 is just around the corner and things will change again.