I've been working on a bodysuit for Roxie. It's one of the reasons why I haven't released any other freebies for a while, last being my fairy outfit. Anyway, I wanted to make this bodysuit as versatile as I could so Roxie could use it as a supersuit, or swimsuit, or leotard. I think I accomplished some of that but I also missed the mark a o few things. Anyway, I've been trying to make some Mat files  for the suit which includes turning parts of the suit invisible. Just one problem... I can't seem to make the suit invisble without it also affecting the color of the suit.

Is there a way to do this without having to make a red suit turn gray or viceversa?

Never mind, I figured it out. Thanks anyway.

Would you mind sharing what you figured out, you know, for future content creators who may have the same problem?

Well, I don't mind. In fact it was pretty simple. I just used textures for the color of the suits instead of material nodes. The base color of the node stays white, so when I make it invisible the texture remians even if the color changes.

My problem now is somehow a material node got switched with another and nothing I do will change it back. I swear i don't understand why it's happening. I even checked the object file and it was fine, but after I rigged it, everything's switched around. I even tried to edit the cr2, but that doesn't change anything either.

I mean it doesn't matter to me that much. I can work around the problem, but anybody needing to do anything with it in the future won't know what I know.

Right now, the Ankle Mat zone has switched places with the Shin Mat zone and the Shin Mat zone is now controlling the Bra Straps Mat zone.

This is very confusing to me.  You should be able to control transparency in the materials with just the transparency slot (and its associated slots, but I suggest not using those).  It should never affect color, whether or not you use an image or procedural nodes or even plain root node swatch to control color.  And you should be able to make body parts invisible independent of materials altogether.  Could you post your node setup?

This is a simple node set up for the base white color. As you can see, the white suit uses  only the Diffuse color node. All the other suit colors have textures added to the diffuse node.

I got the idea from studying the V4 Bodysuit from DAZ to see how they did it.

I'm sorry, could you post a full res version of that?  I'm really not familiar with the "Simple" view, and none of the text is exactly readable.  That said, if I'm reading it right, your transparency is at 1, but your falloff is at 0.6.  And you seem to have a highlight?  If you want something to be invisible, it should have no highlight, no reflection, and no falloff in addition to being fully transparent.  Falloff is meant to mimic the way weaves like nylon become less transparent.  It's not useful in general, because that's better handled with EdgeBlend. 

Still, I don't see from this why a texture would be necessary.  Diffuse color has nothing to do with transparency.  If you just want a plain, flat red, or even a red with a little noise to it, a texture is a waste of resources.  To render, textures have to be made into fully uncompressed files.  They get dumped into a temp folder that doesn't seem to get cleaned much.  They can be from about 10 to over 100 MB.   Unnecessary textures can waste more resources than a mesh with millions of polys.

The transparencies are set at 100% but the edge falloff is at zero. That's why you're seeing the highlights.

 

No, highlights don't have anything to do with edge falloff.  Highlights only get controlled by your specular properties.  In your screenshot, falloff seems to be at the default of 0.6.

When the suit is at full transparency, and with the edge falloff at default value, the suit isn't at full invisibilty. Some of it still renders.  Otherwise I have specular highlights set at 3%.

As for the textures. I don't dispute there may be otherways to go, but this is the way I thought of after studying the DAZ V4 bodysuit. I figured if it was good enough for them it would work for me. Even if it's not the way DAZ did it, it's working for me, so I'll stick with it.  If the end user knows a better way to deal with it let them have at it. They have that option.

First of all, I advise to switch to the Advanced tab. In there you can exactly see what you are doing, unlike the Simple tab.

You can fix the mat zone problem using the Grouping Tool. Make groups for the mat zones and assign the correct materials to the groups, then delete the groups again.

OK.  It's just that users might not be able to do that if there's a problem with your material that your solution is masking.  Which it sounds like there is, because you're describing relationships between completely unrelated properties.  Diffuse and transparency, and transparency falloff and highlight visibility, shouldn't affect each other.

I'd look into it if you were interested, but you're not and I can understand that.