In recent builds I’ve noticed that when I enable transparency for Cycles I get a chequered background, but in earlier builds you could display a solid colour that only affected the background visually and not the GI. This is known as a background switcher in other offline renderers. I’ve only been using Blender(2.80) a few months, but I’ve had it set up as my start file with a background switcher and now I can’t seem to figure out what’s changed between builds(because I haven’t changed any settings that would affect this)
There was a change of policy about transparency.
So, associated color to a transparent background is always black.
If you want a background different than one used for GI, you can directly use a mix shader with a camera light path as factor to mix different background shaders.
But a transparent background means that you will mix render with a still image as background using compositing nodes or another 2D software to composite render.
1 Like
Thanks. That works perfectly. Puzzling why they would remove this feature from the Transparency rollout though?
Black pixels are corresponding to null values. Resulting file size is smaller.
When you are rendering thousand of images of one sequence ; that may be significant.
To me, that decision was taken with animation perspective in mind.
Older behavior was more favorable to producers of illustrations.
I’m mostly using Eevee/Cycles for look dev. My rendering pipeline is in Max/Arnold. Thanks for the info. Good to know.