Working with Mattes

You can use black and white mattes in various ways in Assimilate.

Let's say we want to bring in a Z-Depth Matte, to control the Depth Of Field of our scene.

1. Make sure your Z-Depth Layer channels are mapped correctly.

2. Create a new layer from the left panel.

3. Fetch or Import your matte.

4. Go to the Fill/Matte Menu.

5. Drop the matte in the "Drop Layer Matte" field

   
6. Change the layers to NOT use the Alpha channel. This is incorrect:

   

   The matte is not correct because the Alpha channel is enabled and black and white mattes do not contain an alpah channel.

   This is correct:

   

   With the A turned off, the matte looks correct.

Now that the matte is set up, any adjustments that we make to this layer will use the Matte to influence the effect.