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[3D Joe Wiltshire]

Ah finally! That must have been a long wait for you haha. Cant wait to see it!!

[CoriDavis]

yeah, you're amazing at this. My room is a mess, it wouldn't be very pleasent to animate, lol.

[ADSohr]

Yeah, my room is a mess too, I had to clean it before I could start. 

[ADSohr]

Grr... I made mistake, The laptop is too far back and clips through the desk. Already working on fixing it in post production. I removed everything in the room except the desk and laptop and things needed for proper lighting. I am rerendering, with alpha channel, all of the frames with the laptop in them. Then take the three images(original messed up render, desk render, and alpha channel) and use the alpha channel to remove the border from the fixed desk render, then overlay the fixed desk over the original. I takes me about 2 minutes per frame over 300+ frames... Time to practice perserverence.

[3D Joe Wiltshire]

Oooh thats gotta hurt if I were you i'd render the thing in opengl mode (if you can) and check for errors in that first to save your self a lot of time.

All this waiting is making me want to see it even more! lol

[dwsel]

Alpha compositing 300 frames by hand? 
In your position I'd use compositing software.
These free ones are IMHO worth to have a look at:
http://www.virtualdub.org/
http://www.debugmode.com/wax/
http://avisynth.org/vion11/aveguide.html
http://www.zs4.net/
http://www.cinefx.org/

[ADSohr]

Thanks for the suggestion. Save me quite a bit of time I hope.

[ADSohr]

Can you show me basically how to do what I am trying to do  in virtual dub? It takes me a little while to get used to programs and I would like to finish this up. 

[dwsel]

As I understood you have rendered this as a single frames. You can use VirtualDub to split or join your animation into parts starting with matching frame numbers, like for example base_frames25-80.avi, mask_frames25-80.avi, laptop_frames25-80.avi (avoid hard or better any compression). Then use wax 2.0 - import these 3 animations put the 'base' on the first layer, 'mask/matte' on the second with multiply blending mode (considering it's black shape of laptop on completly white background - if not use invert filter in VirtualDub first before importing) and the 'laptop' (laptop shape on the black background) on third layer with additive blending mode on top. Render the whole thing - if animations are matching with the size and time you shouldn't get halos around the moving shapes.

I know and I can give help how to work with these two programs. Other names I posted seems to be valuable too, but I haven't had time to investigate them further.

If you have any more questions - write here or PM me. I'll reply ASAP when I'll be available.

[ADSohr]

Ok, thanks for the quick reply.

One last question about the compiling these together: In my renders all I want is to edit the area of the laptop, but my render is of the entire desk, so if i were to simply overlay them it would cover up the shelves, games, and other random stuff that is on the desk. Is there any way to not cover those things up?

[dwsel]

You can render the shape of the stuff on desk (black on white background, rendering shadows of shapes would help as well), multiply resulting sequence with desk object sequence - render to separate file, and multiply with desk matte sequence - render to separate animation. Then proceed as I described above using resulting desk and matte and it should be fine.

[edit]
So far with this method I got this. And yes... Objects are hidden behind the desk With additional matte you should work it out.

[ADSohr]

I'm just going to be REALLY lazy  

I cut out the rest of the desk, including the little bit on the left side where the deskframe covers it. So now I should be able to just paste over the original and be done, no extra editing I hope. The only problem I can see is when the laptop opens it will show as soon as it passes the desk. I'll post this latest fix render, it's alpha, and the original as soon as it they are all finished rendering(only a few hours for the fix), so you can see what I'm talking about.

One thing I noticed is the light got dimmed in that process, any fixes for that? or should I just edit it out in GIMP before I merge them into AVI?

Correct me if I am wrong, but I think it would be useful to use the alpha channel to make the background of the fix render transparent, then overlay the fix over the original. I just do not know how to do this in the new programs. I'll read the manuals.

I found a good tutorial for wax that will help.
http://www.debugmode.com/tuts/wax/travelling_mattes/travelling_mattes.htm

[dwsel]

One thing I noticed is the light got dimmed in that process, any fixes for that? or should I just edit it out in GIMP before I merge them into AVI?

Make sure that your matte is mostly pure black and pure white (for solid objects in your scene), gray shades may cause darkening or lightening. You may also try different blending modes. In Wax I had a problems with opacity settings other than 100% for other than normal blending modes (I don't know if it was intended). Of course it should be fixable in postpro too...

Correct me if I am wrong, but I think it would be useful to use the alpha channel to make the background of the fix render transparent, then overlay the fix over the original. I just do not know how to do this in the new programs. I'll read the manuals.

I'm not sure about if it's available in Wax, especially without plugins or other workarounds. It should be possible if your overlaying movie is in 32 bit mode (24 bit for RGB and 8 for Alpha), but I'm not sure how to create one, at least I haven't tried that yet. Overlaying static or moving image would be easier because PNG with alpha or GIF would do the job.

[ADSohr]

Make sure that your matte is mostly pure black and pure white (for solid objects in your scene), gray shades may cause darkening or lightening. You may also try different blending modes. In Wax I had a problems with opacity settings other than 100% for other than normal blending modes (I don't know if it was intended). Of course it should be fixable in postpro too...

Ok, I just quickly removed the lights in GIMP really quick, but I'll keep that in mind when I try out Wax more in other projects.

I'm not sure about if it's available in Wax, especially without plugins or other workarounds. It should be possible if your overlaying movie is in 32 bit mode (24 bit for RGB and 8 for Alpha), but I'm not sure how to create one, at least I haven't tried that yet. Overlaying static or moving image would be easier because PNG with alpha or GIF would do the job.

Hmm... Now I see that there are two different possible aproaches to this; having a background with holes cut out and the foreground moves behind it, or the foreground has transparent areas and floats over the background.

[ADSohr]

I've figured out the process you described and I've followed it, but there are just too many places where it messes things up. I'm thinking that the only way I'm going to get everything to look exactly right is to just completely re-render the whole scene again. I could just render the parts where the laptop shows and delete all non-neccessary objects from the scene(entertainment center, bed, shelves), which would cut down the render time alot.