Render Transparent Backgrounds

Is there a way to set the world color (that defualt flat blue) to transparent? Or am I just stuck having to import it into photoshop and cropping out the background?

In the Render panel, click Key or Premul(tiply) to make the background color Alpha.

when I do that it changes the background to black, is there a value bar somewhere that sets the alpha value?

It’s transparent. You’ll see it when you composite the scene over another one in nodes, or use an Alpha Over effect in the sequence editor, or save the rendered image in a format that preserves alpha (for example, PNG with the RGBA button activated in the Render panels).

cheers man, thats going to save me A LOT of trouble!

I have tried the key and premul key along with the RGBA like the previous posts have suggested and I still get a black background when I try to use the rendered image in frontpage. Help would be greatly appreciated!

You also need to be sure to set your color depth to “Millions of Colors+” – the “+” stands for alpha channel.

What image type are you exporting to frontpage. In order to use the alpha channel you need to save the alpha channel as well. Only web type that stores alpha is png.
The black is just the color that is set as background the alpha value is saved as a separate channel. So the problem is probably not that the background isn’t alpha 0 it is more likely that frontpage isn’t capabale of extracting that information from the image itself.
Try to open the image in the GIMP or Photoshop and see if the background is transparent. If it is then frontpage is your problem.

BTW don’t you want to get a good webeditor? :wink: