"james lake" <gum### [at] sprintmailcom> wrote in message 
news:web.496a5387cd24b95e7352b36c0@news.povray.org...
> Hello:
>
> I am creating an animation with a metallic object which will be used later 
> with
> other (live action) film footage.  I've created the object and have the
> background set to "background { color Green }" and found this works well 
> with
> my video editing software.
>
> However, when I run the animation I notice the metallic surface of the 
> object
> picks up the Greenish color of the background.  To prevent this, I chose 
> these
> settings:
>   ... snip ...
>
> But I am not happy with the result as it looks plain and gray.  What 
> settings
> should I use to simulate an aluminum, metallic (only somewhat shiny) 
> surface?
>

Any reflective settings are generally going to pick up the background color. 
You may therefore wish to consider the following alternatives in some sort 
of combination (some of which I notice are covered by clipka and Ricky. They 
obviously type quicker than I do :o) ):

Ideally load frames of your live-action film footage as a background so that 
you get credible reflections in your metallic object.
Otherwise load a still image with the same sort of colors and features to 
get reasonable but fake reflections.

To do this you can add a plane using an image_map as the pigment and you can 
use the 'no_image' object modifier on the plane so that you can make this 
'false' background image disappear except for through reflections.

Use a transparent background (rgbt 1) and an output file format that 
supports a transparency channel (an alpha channel) so that you don't need to 
eliminate the background as a post-processing step. I believe that Targa and 
PNG formats support an alpha channel. You can set the file type as an ini 
file option (Output_File_Type) or using the +Fxn command-line option. To 
activate the alpha channel (which is off by default) you'll also need to set 
Output_Alpha to 'on' in the ini file (or use the +UA command-line option).

Regards,
Chris B.

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