I'm trying to recreate a scene in Carrara Studio 2 of an animation that I did in 3DSMAX 2.5. Essentially, all I want to do is pseudo-render some clouds by having a bunch of 2D plains with texture maps and an opacity map where the texture goes completely transparent in dark areas on the opacity map:
However, I have tried and tried and tried to get this to work in Carrara with little success. To recap, all I want is to texture a 2D plain with a corresponding opacity map. For some bizarre reason, if you use black on the colour texture it blends out properly to 100% transparent, but this is useless because it gives the clouds black edges.

As you can tell from the screenshot, it's not fading out to 100% transparency. :( Any advice at all would be great. :)

1.) Select the no light interactions when completely transparent option at the bottom of the texture page and see if that helps. 2.) You need to do a little more of a trick when it comes to something like this by mixing your first multi channel texture with a second single transparency channel. I'll try to give it a shot and post the result a little later. -Kix

Litst has a few tutorials on his website for Carrara. The link below is a link to his label tutorial. He shows how to make a texture and its mask work correctly. http://www.chez.com/litst/eng/tut-label/tut-label.htm

Well this turned out to be a lot more of a trick than I had originally percieved. It turns out that Carrara has a very difficult time resolving transparencies when values start to approach zero. Unfortunately for your post, you're aren't at zero! Your blacks are RGB = 1,1,1 and not 0,0,0. Here's my shader tree I built to get it to work. The rendered final image is below. If you want your clouds to be more opaque, push your whites harder to white. -Kix

Here's how it renders. -Kix

Attached Link: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Carrara/files/shader%20butterfly.JPG

Try using this setup for transmaps, seems to work pretty well. Patrick Tuten

The above post is correct. It's kind of a goofy way to handle transparency but you can't argue with the results. This is why I love this forum... At some point in time I think all of us have burned a few hours figuring this one out. I believe the image at the link above was created by litst following some information given by Antoine from Eovia some time back. Mark www.MarkBremmer.com

Thanks everyone for your comments and suggestions. Some interesting points in there. Unfortunately, there's no pleasing some people. ;) Everything's fine, except that once the plains are layered, they have artifacts where the textures cross over: There seems to be some problem around the 128 (0-255) point and it becomes all or nothing. Unfortunately, the animation requires quite alot of billboards like this one, so I'll suggest to Eovia having a definate opacity map and a self-luminance control in future releases of Carrara. Once again, thanks to everyone for their comments.

Mark has done this the best way. I tried it that way last night but didn't get it finished before another crisis broke out. I was more interested in the original problem because you should be able to get some kind of result with it even if it is jaggy around the edges. -Kix