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[BLENDER] Transparent texture renders black

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LilyNion polycounter lvl 3
(Before I get the comments "google" or "look on the wiki": I've done both. I'm right now having 15 tabs open with all types of tutorials and none seem to help).

HAY. IT'S ME. LILY. I'm back again with another question because after googling and half crying for four hours in total, I gave up. 

I'm trying to make low-poly hair. Now mind you, I am doing it on a sculpted base but it's mainly for practice. I made all the planes, shaped them, I created my texture and saved it as transparent .png. In the texture/material view, the plane that's selected shows that it has no background. Just the hair texture, just like I want. However, once I render it, it gets this very.. odd.. black background underneath the texture.

In Material view:

Rendered:


I've tried using the blender render and followed these steps, as suggested by many blender user:


Then came the question, is it really alpha? Unsure, I made a .TGA (I was told this keeps Alpha) which was saved while created with Alpha:
Same story.


Then I became hopeless and began to look into cyclus render. I looked at a few tutorials and these were the nodes I found and recreated

Result: 



So yeh I'm with my hands in my hair (No pun inteded) and I have no idea what to do. 

Replies

  • LilyNion
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    LilyNion polycounter lvl 3
    Oh quick sidenote, I would prefer if I can fix it without cyclus. I know that cyclus node is made for realistic rendering and I've heard it's very hard to export cyclus materials to UE4 because it's an entirely different thing.
  • AtticusMars
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    AtticusMars greentooth
    Are you trying to make this model for UE4? If so what does your UE4 material graph look like?

    Materials in general do not export well, you will usually have to build a material graph inside Unreal Engine in order for it to look right.


  • LilyNion
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    LilyNion polycounter lvl 3
    As for now, I don't have any UE4 material graph. My partner is learning how to use UE4, I don't even own it myself (which will cause some lovely troubles if I have to check things out). I'll contact him about the material graph.

    Does it matter if the transparency doesn't show up in blender for UE4? 
  • AtticusMars
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    AtticusMars greentooth
    LilyNion said:
    As for now, I don't have any UE4 material graph. My partner is learning how to use UE4, I don't even own it myself (which will cause some lovely troubles if I have to check things out). I'll contact him about the material graph.
    Just an FYI, Unreal Engine 4 is free, you can go download it whenever you feel like it.

    Does it matter if the transparency doesn't show up in blender for UE4? 

    Nope. The way Unreal and Blender render materials is totally different, afaik it is not possible to get an accurate result (as in something that will look the same in UE4) out of Blender because it does not use PBR (although some people have gotten similar results with Cycles pseudo-PBR shaders). Exporting materials is usually broken 90% of the time so I always end up setting my materials up inside Unreal.

    If you are still interested in solving this issue though, your problem is that your material is set to Z-Transparency, in order to use the Alpha channel you need to set it to Masked.



  • LilyNion
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    LilyNion polycounter lvl 3
    OH I'l get the engine! Thank you so much!

    As for my issue.. Okay this is quite awkward. But erhm. Let's just say that it was transparent all along. It was just casting such a harsh and dark shadow due to my rendering that it looks like it was part of the plane. Coughs
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