I just discovered Bella, and it seems great. However, with the free version, is it possible to render something with a transparent background? Additionally, can you add a ground plane just for shadows? I’ve spent a good time trying to figure out a solution, but I can’t get it to work. Alternatively, is it possible to just set the background to a solid colour that doesn’t change with the lighting?
starting with a simple scene with a plane (not the rhino ground plane) and a cube, set 360 environment to “no environment” and enable “use custom environment” for reflections & skylighting:
it would also be possible to choose some other color by using background > solid color, but we will just use “no environment” for this example
next, select the plane, go to object properties > bella, and enable “capture shadows”; this will remove the plane from view, showing the black background we get from setting 360 environment to “no environment”:
now, to get that background rendered as alpha, set alpha=embedded in render settings:
lastly, enable the shadow pass, which will show shadows captured by the plane, since it has “capture shadows” enabled
we can now render inside of rhino to get this result:
however since we cannot currently show the shadow pass in rhino, and since it is generally preferable, we can send the scene to bella GUI for our final rendering; there by default we will see the RGB image:
and we can switch it to display RGBA:
and view the shadow pass:
in the console panel, you can see where the files have been saved:
I am showing this in windows but it will work the same on mac, so please give it a try and let me know if it answers your questions (also please feel free to join our discord, at the link in my profile, where it is easier to chat in real time)
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Wow. Cheers for such an in-depth response. Shame it isn’t so simple like in the Rhino render, but it works perfectly. Thank you!