There are several ways to create an image to be used for a photo’s mask.
• Use the Draw Mask mode to draw the mask onto the image.
• Use the Create Masks Dialog to create a mask based on alpha channel or chroma key.
• Create a mask image outside of PhotoModeler, using the following steps:
• Open an image editor that supports layers.
• Open the photo to which you want to apply a mask.
• Save the file with a new name as a duplicate so that you do not accidentally overwrite the original.
• Create a new layer and paint it solid white, and adjust the layer transparency so that you can see the underlying image.
• Paint in black over the areas that you want to mask out. You may wish to fade the edges or use anti-aliasing so that you have a smooth mask border. Any areas painted black will be masked, areas painted white will be transparent and shades in between will be graduated (i.e. the darker the mask, the more opaque it will be).
• Save the mask layer as a separate image on disk (usually the folder with the project images is the best location). Only the gray information in a mask image is used, so typically the mask image should be saved as an 8 bit grayscale image.
• When you click on the Mask property, the “Browse for mask file” and "Create Mask" hyperlinks appear.
•
Click the Browse hyperlink and to locate the
mask image that you saved to disk. Once you click OK, the mask is assigned to
the photo, and when you next open a 3D Viewer with Surfaces and Photo Textures
turned on, you should see that the areas that were masked no longer appear in
the photo texture, as shown in the example below:
This
shows a screen capture of a model in two 3D Viewers. The one on the left shows
a photo texture with a mask assigned to one of the photos, while on the right
the model is shown without the mask.