[FIXED] Toolbag 3 Refraction Opacity

Waz0

Hello there!

I recently got to mess around with the refraction in Toolbag 3 (really nice addition to the soft), trying to mimic the behaviour of heat emitted by an engine. Everything's fine on the refraction effect itself, but one thing I'm stumbling over is to obtain a transition from totally transparent to "hey it's refractive". It seems the refraction preset doesn't allow it, and looking at the official video the mask slot isn't meant to be used that way.

I tried to add a custom shader, copy-pasting the shaders from the "transparency" folder to the "custom" one, but without success.

So do I miss something ?
Or is it maybe possible using some tricks ?

I didn't found anything addressing this subject so far, sorry if there is

Thanks a bunch!

EarthQuake

Neat idea!

So first off, you're right that the mask slot won't be able to do this. The mask is to blend between transparent/refractive materials and opaque materials, for instance if you have dirt on a windshield, you would use the mask slot.

We've added another mask slot in later builds though, the cutout slot. This fades between refractive and completely transparent surfaces. Generally this would be used to mask out the broken section of a smashed window texture, but we can re-purpose it here to do what you need by enabling Use Dither.



Top: No Cutout texture loaded
Middle: Cutout texture loaded with default settings
Bottom: Cutout + Use Dither enabled

With Use Dither on, you'll see some noise in the effect in the viewport, however, you can reduce the noise for your final renders by going to Capture Settings (Ctrl+P) and increasing the sampling.

Waz0

Hey,

That did the trick indeed, thanks for the tip and breakdown EarthQuake. I guess I just should have updated before posting ..

Here's the raw result. Just need some refinements now




From early testing refraction really improve translucent renders above the other presets, I like it