Is there a way to have it leave the background empty when it renders. And by that I mean NO information. Not just a white background but a transparency. So that if you looked at it in Photoshop the background would be the little grey checkers indicating transparency.

No, but every time you render, an alpha is automatically created. So, you can force a transparent image by putting a plane behind the entire scene. The alpha will automatically be adjusted according to the material opacity of the plane.

Hi ZackCulver,

I have found a way of doing this. If you go into render/environment and click on environment map. You then load in the opacity(base) map. Then in your render setup save out your images as png. You can save a whole animation like this in single frames and then put it all back together in a program such as sony vegas or other software of a similar nature.

You will find that that the png images will have the checkerboard pattern on loading into photoshop also.

Asimov

As the young wipper-snappers say "good looking out dawg". This is exactly what I was needing!

Nice tips.. and it also works with TGA images.

TGA? Is that another file type? I'm familiar with .png's

Ya, .tga is another widely supported image format. That actually should have been included among the 'standard' list. Thanks for pointing that out, bro.