Hi gurus,

I recently was helped with animating a texture for my bus from one color to another over time. Worked great. Thought it would then be just as easy to make the bus disappear, simply by adjusting the transparency settings. Hah!

I've tried animating transparency to 1.00 and zero falloff, zero tran edge. I would have thought that transparency set to max would make it disappear.

These are the settings for just one of the textures for the body. I just cant get it to disappear. Suggestions?

You need to zero out the specular value also, otherwise the bus will turn to clear plastic rather than disappear.

Oh thank you. I'll try that.

still not working. I'm sure it's me. This is the setting for inside the bus. Pretty simple. I set transparency to 1, set specular value to zero, fall off and edge also zero I can animate the diffuse value to zero which makes it black, but not transparent. I have no clue.

weirdly, i set the inside setting for transparency edge to 1 and falloff to 100 and poof, it was gone. still no clue, but at least more is invisible :)

Cannot get it to work, only parts. Other parts still show. So many nodes that i don't understand. Thanks anyway.

If it has multiple material zones, every material zone will have to be animated to go invisible.

Failing all else, you could simply render twice: first with the bus, and a second time without. Then load the footage into a video editor and do a crossfade from one video track to the other.

I tried making the material zones all animated to go invisble. I tried turning off specular value for any node, IF it was available. Where it had alternate specular, I animated that to zero. In the above image, the only node connected has no specular value so i animated texture strength to zero, which got rid of the texture, but didn't make it any less visible. I tried a lot of things, but not understanding doesn't help.

Failing all that, I did "sort of" do what Little Dragon suggested. I rendered the background, foreground, and then created the bus in PS, making frames where it was less and less opaque until it disappeared, then layered the images and voila, disappearing bus. Not optimal, but it worked.

Had to mess with the sandwiching because I was using volumetric smoke effect. Had to dump that effect because i couldn't figure out how to layer that effectively.

The bus is a freebie from sharecg with many parts and nodes. Great bus, too many parts. ;) Have to see if I can stand how it looks to see if I want to try to make it go invisible the correct way. Why can't anything be simple? Just a dial for Transparent? hmmmm? Gah!!!

Thanks everyone.

Based on some experiments I conducted with Godzilla a few years back, I think it's possible to link all the transparency and specular values to a single master dial, but just setting that up would require more effort than doing everything manually.

Of course, once it's in all place, you can use it again and again ....

Why not just animate the bus's scale down to something tiny like 0.1% over just a few frames? It will seem to pop out of existence rather than fade away. Then drop it well below the ground for the rest of the animation so there are no spurious shadows, reflections or other interactions.

Those are both GREAT ideas. Thank you so much. I'm not really happy with the PS version. It worked, but I liked the volumetric haze.

Shrinking it is just as good as it disappearing, especially when you have super radioactive powers. :)

Thanks again, everyone.

I just skimmed, so I'm not sure if I figured out your problem or not... If you are trying to make a material transparent and it has a texture linked to the transparency channel, then it will only become as transparent as the texture will allow it. I've wished that transparency values could go beyond 1.00, but at 1.00, any areas of your texture (alpha) that aren't black will always be visible.

I did not know this until last night, but it's apparently possible to use the blend node to transition your texture to another pure black image over a range of frames. Using this technique on the textured parts should let you turn them completely invisible.

Little_Dragon posted at 12:12AM Sun, 18 October 2015 - #4233979

Failing all else, you could simply render twice: first with the bus, and a second time without. Then load the footage into a video editor and do a crossfade from one video track to the other.

This would look even better if one video track had the bus disappearing as it does currently. This would allow you to still glimpse interior parts of the bus through itself, rather than just seeing straight through the bus to the background. But then you might want to throw in some mechanical details (suspension, drive train, etc.) the bus may not already have...

Thanks again everyone. I would like to solve it, just because it bugs me that I can't. But animation takes so much time and I know so little about nodes and such.

I'm not even using firefly since I would be dead before it finished rendering. It's an animation to a music track that is 3 minutes long. That may not seem like much time, but it is to me. It's just for fun... well it was...grrrrrr.

I just wanted to see if I could do it with my minimal skill level. It was going along nicely (for me) until this. I had help with turning the bus red from it's original colors to red, which was a whole new horizon for me. I didn't know you could change the texture color animating it. A new gnarly skill for me.

Not sure where I will take it now, but I know I can shrink it out of existence without any hassle, so that is very appealing. I'm only half way through the song so there is much more to do to get stuck in 1 shot too long.

I do appreciate, as always, the incredible help from the forum here. Thank you all again.

[putrdude]

I'm not even using firefly since I would be dead before it finished rendering. It's an animation to a music track that is 3 minutes long. That may not seem like much time, but it is to me. It's just for fun... well it was...grrrrrr.

So... You are using Poser's preview I assume?

I worked on a large project a few years ago that required a few hundred 5-15 second clips. Managed to tweak the parameters (pixel samples, shading rate etc.) to the point that I was able to get the look I wanted with each frame taking just under a minute to render (Firefly). Still, it would be very nice to see some improvements to the preview mode given what games these days are doing at 60fps.

Totally agree moo, I am using the preview mode.

I think the last time I tried a FF render it was 9 mins. per frame, on a I7 6 core machine with gobs of memory and SSD drive. In this little video I use volumetric smoke and that doesn't speed things up. I suppose I could play with the pixel count and render passes, but we're still talking about a long time. I'll give it a try just to learn and see if it looks all that much better.

Thanks.

putrdude posted at 3:56PM Mon, 19 October 2015 - #4234304

I am using the preview mode.

Ah, you're using preview? Then look in render:render settings:preview and check the limit of transparency; by default it is set to 90% transparency. You'd want to set it to 100%, or better yet, select "actual".

Thank you again. You think that was it? Ugh! Very helpful,again.

Well, that preview setting is enough in itself to prevent you from making a bus disappear in preview, but you also need to make sure all material zones' specular are zeroed out.

Thanks, but most of the nodes didn't have specular dials. I am going to try it again, just to see if i can do it. It's a lot of nodes and a lot of pieces, but it's worth a shot. The word thing was that some parts disappeared completely and perfectly even though it was set at 90% in preview mode. I turned all specular dials I could find down to zero, and still i had bus parts hanging out all over. it was embarrassing. ;)

Thanks as always!

Figure out what material zones correspond to the parts which fail to disappear, and post screenshots of those materials.

Okly dokly. I will do that. Thanks again.

This is with Preview Render at 100% per your previous instructions. The green arrow points to the part of the bus that is still opaque. 2 nodes appear to be not connected. Tried changing transparency edge to zero as well as falloff to zero, no effect.

Falloff is generally from 0 to 1. Change the falloff to 0. You're right that two image maps are left orphaned; they are probably alternate textures.

Verify the identity of the material by temporarily changing the red color block to green. Do you still see red bus pieces? If so, you also need to identify those material zones. It will save time if you post screen grabs of any materials left still visible.

Okay, this is weird. The tires reappeared on opening the file. Nothing was changed. The tires are a section called Gumi. I changed spec value to zero, falloff 0, edge 0, and they stay visible. Gumi settings: The bus down settings, changed to zero and colored purple look like this:

bus body image

Ah, now we're getting somewhere. Your purple tire material looks OK, but I'd untick Reflection_Lite_Mult (also Reflection_Kd_Mult if it is ticked in any material). Just experimenting, but set Highlight_Size to a small positive number, maybe 0.06; small numbers make intense highlights, and 0 may cause a divide by zero issue. I notice that the tires aren't opaque; I can see the entire shape of the red steel wheel through the purple tire.

In the lower screenshot, that tells us that the red body panels are not controlled by that material zone. Look in the drop-down list of material zones and go through them one by one. Assign them distinctive colors to identify what is what. When you are in the material room, one of the materials will display by default. Click the little triangle to see the list of material zones.

In this case, the selected prop/object is the LightClaymore; the currently selected material zone is LightBlade.

Ugh sorry to bother you with this. Went through all items. Removed reflection lite multi on all of them Found 1 drop down called only RED show here too. Still bus not gone.

RED:

busdown stlil showing in red opaque

Try animating the reflection value to 0 as well.

raven posted at 4:04PM Thu, 22 October 2015 - #4234777

Try animating the reflection value to 0 as well.

Yep. The reflection in the material "RED" is what's showing. Animate reflection_value down to zero.

By going through this, Putrdude, you're learning foundational Poser stuff which you'll use in many future projects. It's worth doing.

I've learned a lot. I didn't even know you could animate all these things. I thought those keys were for the liquor cabinet.

I animated all refelection_values down to zero. No change. This ain't no ordinary bus.

This is strange. If I make the transparency edge 100.00, and trans falloff 100, I can get the "carpet" part to disappear. It's actually on the side of the bus inside. It becomes transparent for a moment, then changes the dial to 1 (max) for transparency edge, but at least you can see through it now. Going to experiment more with these two settings.

This is the INSIDE of the bus. All red. Nothing fancy, no nodes. Everything zeroed out.

Opaque as can be.

Do you have your preview render settings set for OpenGL with hardware shading enabled?