Hey guys, so I’m trying to make a ghost and, unsurprisingly, just turning on transparency doesn’t really make for the best results. The goal is to make something like Gusteau from Ratatouille 
where you can see through him and he has that aura around him. I assume it’s more of a compositing thing than anything else, and I’m not terribly familiar with it. Any help would be greatly appreciated.
Thanks!
I think you can make it a bit transparent, and the aura effect you can try to do it with the glow effect, or more glow effects for better results.
The problem I had with making it transparent is that you can still see the parts of the body mesh through the clothes, the mouth and eyes through the head, etc. and it looks really bad. This almost seems like it was originally rendered solid, but put back through on top of the background with slight transparency and the glow. Does that sound like it would work? and if so, how would I go about doing that?
That’s incredible, thank you! Do you know how I would be able to do that with an animation? Would I have to render out the background shot and then do the same thing again with the character and bring it all together with the alpha over? Or is there a way to combine it in one go?
You don’t have to render twice. The ghost object should be on a separate render layer from the rest of the scene. Then in the compositor you bring everything together.
render layers tut
gahh thank you so much!
Quick follow-up question, actually: say I want a regular, non-ghost object in front of the ghost. If it’s on the first render layer, the ghost will be over top of it. I tried to add a separate, shadeless object on the ghost render layer, but either I couldn’t get the materials right, or it just doesn’t work. How could I do that?
Sorry, I just re-read that and realized that it makes somewhere between little and no sense. Basically, if I wanted to put the Suzanne head from the example above in a box where the top of the head is peeking out, how would I go about that?
enable ‘All Z’ for the monkey layer
So simple…thank you yet again!