Alpha glow using ShaderFX and ambient light in Maya LT

iadagraca

I can not for the life of my understand why this is happening.

But it only occurs when I use ambient light.

But for some reason it does not affect the plane below?

Ashaman73

Check the blending mode, it looks like additive blending instead of alpha blending.

kodde

This is using the Traditional Game Surface ShaderFX graph or something custom built?

iadagraca

Yes just using the traditional surface shader.

And yeah i thought that too but i've been looking for a setting for that but can't find one

And note this only happens when there's an ambient light, looks fine with all other lights.

kodde

Well transparency in Maya's viewport has never been an issue-free feature. Can't you find a workaround to using ambient lights? Maybe a cube map for ambient lighting? Point lights with quadratic falloff and low intensity (relative to their distance from target)?

radiancef0rge

I dont think its possible. But you should be able to use the ambient lighting node in ShaderFX already and accomplish the same goal?

iadagraca

radiancef0rge wrote: »

I dont think its possible. But you should be able to use the ambient lighting node in ShaderFX already and accomplish the same goal?

Yeah this is my solution for now. Using the emissive node

My intent wasn't too have 100% ambient, but maybe I can still make it work.

shaderfx

Hey, thanks for posting the problem.

I forgot to compensate the ambient light for pre-multiplied-alpha in maya.
If you want to fix it yourself locally, then you can:

Enable Advanced Mode
Go into traditional game surface shader
Go into "InsideLightLoop" grp

Find the node "AmbientLightAndAO"
Create a "Multiply" node
Connect the output from "AmbientLightAndAO" with the "Opacity" input from the InsideLightLoop node

Connect the output from the new Multiply node to the "VectorContruct" node that "AmbientLightAndAO" was originally connecting to.

Now, to save your work, you have to enable "Overwrite System Nodes".
exist both groups.
Select the Traditional game node
Press "Save Group".

This will overwrite the traditional surface node with your fix so next time you use it it will have your fix.

I'll try to submit this fix for 2016 still.

iadagraca

Awesome thank you for the solution!

I'll try this later today

EDIT: Actually I tried it now and it works perfectly! Thank you!