Silent hill blood stains - Targas with alpha - Maya 2011 not displaying?

amr3d

Hey All, this is my first post. I have wondered recently why my targas wont display alphas in mayas hardware renderer. Anybody else have this issue?

Also I'm wondering if that's the best method to get blood stains and local detail in an environment.




Right now I have two textures on the wall applied to different polygons. The handprint is a targa with the alpha channel saved into it. I get the same result when using high quality renderer?

PerfectChaos

I'm actually having this same issue with Targas in Maya 2010, sorry I don't have a solution but I felt really stupid when it happened thinking I did something wrong that the alpha wasn't working. In the Multilister the material appears with the alpha working, but when I render it doesn't seem to be working.

kodde

So this is not a polygon plane placed in front of the wall? It's a layered shader? layered texture? or what?

Here's one common way:
http://wiki.polycount.com/Decal

amr3d

Totally, its really one of those 'shouldnt this just work' moments for me :P. I wonder if it has to do with the newer versions of maya. Maybe a new option box somewhere..?

Hey Kodde: Its just an 512 targa texture on a plane. I make sure it has an alpha channel, but cant get the display in maya. Thanks for the wiki! Though I couldnt find anything on targas, it was very helpful.

kodde

I only have 2010 64-bit here at home so cannot confirm with 2011, but I highly doubt it being the problem. Got 2011 at work.

Did you verify the alpha channel has some relevant b/w data in the resulting .tga? Did you check your hypershader and verify that your File has correct outgoing connections to your material? .outColor -> .color and outTransparency -> .transparency?

Does it work with High Quality enabled?

amr3d

Its strange, I'm used to maya automatically connecting the transparency when using targas w/ an alpha channel. I dont think its happening in this case. Also, high quality render doesn't seem to effect it.

kodde

So it worked when you manually connected the attributes?

Maya still automatically does this, given that it is a 32-bit targa with an alpha channel or any similar format.

willy-wilson

using a .png will work, i haven't been able to get tga's to work either.

willy-wilson

actually i just tried it and they both work perfectly.

raul

i had this problem way back in maya 8. My machine was very old and it was a graphics card issue. I ended up using pngs for the hardware rendering.