Lighting and Grass Textures on a Plane
polycounter lvl 8
Hello Everyone,
Upon making texture maps for a model Ive stumbled upon an issue regarding post-compositing. I used a simple BLINN shader, and I call it MATERIAL_Turntable, and my renderer is Mental Ray. My goal is to have light pass through the transparent areas of the planes that are NOT covered by the leaves and grass blades of the texture in MULTIPLE RENDER PASSES such as Ambient Occlusion, Diffuse Material Color, Shadows, Ambient Irradiance, etc. I also want the turntable to be visible when the grass overlaps with it and the grass blades appear to be in front of the edges of the platform. The three grass blades and the moss-covered platform are FOUR continuous meshes and they share the same texture-map. Now for some details. All four of these nodes that have a texture map have a .tif file being called as the texture. The Color map is a 32-bit Targa with an alpha channel, and both the COLOR and TRANSPARENCY nodes of the Turntable Material call the same file node that has the color map. Only the bump node has Alpha is Luminance checked. So is there any way I can achieve what I want for this shader? It seems like a pretty simple task. There has to be something Im doing wrong! Is error displayed in the Script Editor the problem? Is (Maya Scene) : output data type rgba_h not directly supported by image format tif the main cause? Remember this is a BLINN shader and the color map is a .tga file. I just want to know if I can make light pass through the transparency of a BLINN shader or if this task is achievable ONLY through a mia_ shader for mental ray. For some visuals Ive included some test renders for my model that I want to render and take into post. They are attached below. Any advice will help on this matter.
Thanks.
Upon making texture maps for a model Ive stumbled upon an issue regarding post-compositing. I used a simple BLINN shader, and I call it MATERIAL_Turntable, and my renderer is Mental Ray. My goal is to have light pass through the transparent areas of the planes that are NOT covered by the leaves and grass blades of the texture in MULTIPLE RENDER PASSES such as Ambient Occlusion, Diffuse Material Color, Shadows, Ambient Irradiance, etc. I also want the turntable to be visible when the grass overlaps with it and the grass blades appear to be in front of the edges of the platform. The three grass blades and the moss-covered platform are FOUR continuous meshes and they share the same texture-map. Now for some details. All four of these nodes that have a texture map have a .tif file being called as the texture. The Color map is a 32-bit Targa with an alpha channel, and both the COLOR and TRANSPARENCY nodes of the Turntable Material call the same file node that has the color map. Only the bump node has Alpha is Luminance checked. So is there any way I can achieve what I want for this shader? It seems like a pretty simple task. There has to be something Im doing wrong! Is error displayed in the Script Editor the problem? Is (Maya Scene) : output data type rgba_h not directly supported by image format tif the main cause? Remember this is a BLINN shader and the color map is a .tga file. I just want to know if I can make light pass through the transparency of a BLINN shader or if this task is achievable ONLY through a mia_ shader for mental ray. For some visuals Ive included some test renders for my model that I want to render and take into post. They are attached below. Any advice will help on this matter.
Thanks.
Replies
Personally, I don't know Maya's rendering all that well. I use mental ray in 3ds Max quite a bit. But this is primarily a game artist forum, not a rendering one.
You could easily do this kind of scene in a game engine, and get proper masking, and nice AO.
If you want to learn how to render transparency for games, use a game engine.
also, make sure "Alpha is Luminance" is check in your color map
http://www.polycount.com/forum/showpost.php?p=2334661&postcount=3
I've already set the shadow attenuation for both texture shaders to 0. I even did the same for the translucency sliders.
btw, do you how to access the "Attenuate According to Transparency" option in the Render Pass Attribute Editor? I've been trying to look for it but I can't seem to get a straight answer from the internet.
Not all the passes have this option, however.
http://i.imgur.com/DV2F6yX.png