Volume lights and transparent planes

Soccerman18

I have a scene for an animation I'm working on where I have several planes with an opacity map on them going behind an omni light with a volume light effect on it. The problem is that the volumeness is somehow causing the entire plane to show. Even if the plane's material is completely transparent I can still see the plane, although there's no texture to it and it's just a gray box.

I'm using Max 8 and the material is a smokey/cloudy texture and seeing the edges of the plane doesn't look too good. It's on the other side of the light from the camera so it wouldn't be the result of shadows.

Been trying to see if there's some sort of rendering quality option that might get rid of it, something in the material, volume light settings, anything to get rid of it but I've had no luck yet. Any ideas?

CrazyButcher

this is a flaw of max's renderer, same issue rooster had with his rtt problem. Ever tried using a different renderer, like vray or mentalray ? (no clue if that helps)

Mark Dygert

Is there some reason you couldn't use atmospheric gizmos instead of smokey planes? Basically the gizmos make smokey clouds max understands as smokey clouds instead of planes. The clouds gizmos can be animated like planes. Provided you aren't restricted to using planes for some other reason?

Create > Helpers > Atmospherics > Box Gizmo

Nothing beats fake smoke like, fake smoke

Soccerman18

I tried mental ray and that looked even worse, didn't try vray. Stupid Max scanline.

I didn't use a smokey clouds gizmo because I didn't know there was a smokey clouds gizmo. I was using smokey clouds planes (or rather pFlow generated smokey clouds planes) because that was the only way I knew of off hand to get smokey clouds. I was not aware that there is a smokey clouds gizmo that can make smokey clouds that would look better than the smokey clouds I get from my pFlow generated smokey clouds planes. Gonna have to try that. Smokey clouds!

Eric Chadwick

Yeah, this is an old problem in Max's renderer, opacity not behaving well with fog. You could also replce the smoke with another volume light, like an Omni, and use negative power if you want dark smoke. Try reducing the Sample Volume % to 5 or so for quicker volume renders.

<edit> oops, remembered wrong, can't do negative on volume lights.

Soccerman18

The smokey clouds box is working better with the volume light, no more edges showing up. And I was able to use a script to get it to work with particles, and I wrote another script to add the atmosphere effect on all those gizmos. Lights don't seem to have any effect on them though, may be a problem.