For all you modelers out there, Nurbs And Polys recently opened a modeling forum that plans to be an open and informative modeling community. Based on the idea of community driven support, it would be a great place to start posting suggestions for topics to support it’s resource forum and soon to be built wiki. With the demise of a couple of popular modeling forums it definitely would be a good place to move to.

Rendering is pretty straight forward, you pick a resolution and make your textures and render. Voila it looks great on the screen. Heck you may even take your masterpiece and print it on your inkjet on some photo paper and it still looks great. For the most part, rendering is done for the screen and in a lot of cases printing looks after itself by the inherent nature that rendering to 2K (2000 pixel, or 2K x 2K) is pretty typical, but what do you do when you actually have a client that needs your artwork printed big… I mean big like 10 feet big (or bigger)?

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I was going to write a big article and have some fancy images to describe the difference between a straight RGBA (rgb+alpha) (unmultiplied) and a premultiplied RGBA image. As it turns out I found a good video over on tv.adobe.com that explains it quite well from the point of view of using a compositor package like After Effects. What this video won’t tell is how to configure your rendering application, but suffice to say there is usually an option that will indicate if the alpha is premultiplied or not.

Generally for many of you, if you’re rendering on black, blue or green and you’ve been using a premultiplied RGBA image, you haven’t really noticed much an issue especially if you’ve been using AE. However, if you are doing full backdrop integration, then an unmulitplied RGBA image is the way to go.

I may still provide an example of using a package like Cinema 4D and rendering out alpha at later date but I hope this video clears it up. If not, leave a comment and I’ll help you out.