Render part of the mesh only

Support Lighting and Rendering
1

Hi,
as first I’m not 3D modeller/graphics artist so feel free to correct any misunderstandings in my post.

I have a rigged soldier mesh in blender. There are some animations for the soldier there as a walk, idle, etc. I’.m rendering the soldier by my custom script for the isometric game (so 8 directions for each animation, etc.). I’m using cycles as renderer.

What I would like to know is if it is possible to render only part of the mesh of the soldier, for instance only left arm or head. The soldier is one mesh and isn’t divided to any sub-objects. I’ve tried to “cut” the arm as a solo object, but then the “seam” is renderer when the arm is cut. So I’m looking for the solution when the mesh could stay as whole.

So it is even possible to do it? I mean in general not only in blender?

What I’m trying to achieve is to render all the parts of the body (arms, torso, head, legs) as separate images and then compose it back in the game (with the correct “z sorting”). If it is possible I would be curious what the output be like, that is if some visible seams would be there in the game after compositing? Or would it be indistinguishable from the render as a whole (I’ll doubt that but want to try it :-/ ).

Thank You

2

Replying to myself,

I’ve found some info how to make a material transparent to the camera http://blender.stackexchange.com/questions/6796/how-to-render-a-shadow-without-the-object-in-the-scene. So I assigned the material to the vertex group (for hand for instance) and it looks good so far. Now I only need a way to make it fully “scriptable”.

Anyway, if anyone got some other idea, please share it.

Thank You