Forum Coordinators: Kalypso
Carrara F.A.Q (Last Updated: 2024 Nov 05 6:06 am)
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This Mixer technique works well for your papillon. I shall give it a try. Perhaps my method was causing the textures of planes 1 and 2 to interact, or mix, somehow. I see the advantages of your method - it doesn't require inversion of the Poser transparency map, and it allows intuitive gradation of the degree of transparency.
Isn't there a subtle distinction between transparency and alpha? I think transparency means see-through-ness whereas alpha means is it there or not. Then there's translucency to complicate matters which I think means whether or not a backlight can cast an image of itself on the material such the image can be seen looking at the front of the material. One of the things I've been playing around with in different apps is putting a bulb light inside a sphere and then seeing if you can see any light seeping through the sphere surface (from the outside) with different transparency/translucency/alpha settings. The result seems to vary somewhat between apps.
In some 3d programs you can use alpha to alter geometry. Let's say you want to have a bunch of star-shaped holes in a sphere for example. You can apply an alpha texture map of black stars on a white background. Then if you put a bulb light inside the sphere and turn on volumetric/cone lighting the light will shoot out through the the star holes. Making the stars 100% transparent (not an alpha) is different but maybe in some programs amounts to the same thing. C4D for example has separate transparency and alpha channels in its material system. Lightwave has an option where you can say that a texture map is an alpha (and I think this can happen in any channel that accepts texture maps). Carrara's G-buffers are handy in that you can do things with the alpha mask in Photoshop as suggested in the previous posting. Some programs allow you to render in multiple passes to facilitate compositing in Photoshop or After Effects (I've been surprised to see how much "3D" work is actually done post-process in Photoshop).
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