I am working on a project where there are some parts of the scene that glow. I found out how to do the effect itself; that is not the problem. What I cannot figure out how to do is combine to render layers together using the compositor. I would appreciate any links or advice.
Cheers.
In the compositor you will need to add an new input for each render layer. You can then layer them one over the other by using either Color / Alpha Over or Color / Z combine. If you have layers that represent different z depths in your scene use Z combine, if instead it is a simple mater of overlaying a few objects over a solid background then Alpha over would work. Finally, use Full Sample Antialiazing to get rid of any OSA artifacts. To do this, in your Render Output panel click Save Buffers and FullSample.
Gee whizz!!! Thank you so so much dichotomymatt for those last two sentences about Full sample anti-aliasing. I’d never heard about it and thought that those annoying thin white edges i get when mix 3d and live footage where a limitation of blender itself.
Ahhh, I’m giggling.
Thanks to Musk and Rinne, I suggested Rinne use FSA but could not find the exact steps to make it work in his Gnomons House. Luckily Musk finally came to the rescue. FSA is such a great feature it just has not been documented well.
annoying thin white edges might be solved by enabling alpha pre-multiply when mixing.
One more thing from my experience don’t use z-combine if you are doing glow using blur cause z-combine will destroy that glow. Use the alpha over or mix nodes.
I think that anyone answering basic questions like this should also politely point to the wiki documentation with a suggestion that the questioner should perhaps read the nicely created manual.
Edit: Not saying we should do this to be rude or anything – just that from my perspective if they are asking such a basic functionality question, they may not even know that there is good documentation available.