Maya Viewport + Transperency + Use No Lights PROBLEM PLEASE HELP

Arthur Ramazanov

Hello Everyone I have been trying to do a hand painted texture - WoW Style plants and trees.

I have used Alpha maps before only with next gen and current assets, using high quality rendering and it always worked - So here is the issue

In order to get a WoW style look in the Maya Viewport - I used the settings "USE NO LIGHTS"
When I tried making a bush and trees and have it on a plane - it did not render in Default Quality Render -

The transparency alpha only in high quality render for me but then the color maps turn to black...

So I either can see All my regular assets in the scene with No lights and all my plants with no transparency - or I see all black silhouettes with transparency...

Please Help me...Any advice will be nice...I do have access to 3ds MAX but I am not as familiar with it as Maya

claydough

with your deafault light you can get a flat constant color like your wow example by material settings alone.
Since you don't need specularity or reflection...
change your material's "type" to lambert in the materials attributes.
Crank the diffuse setting all the way up.
And then Crank your material's Ambient Color all the way up.
If your default light has a default white color and a default setting of 1 u should be good to go.
If for some reason you need a light value other than 1 the ambient color can be adjusted to match.
( simply adjust ambient till color is flat. Diffuse is Always cranked to 1 )

chronic

just use a surface shader

elementrix

Or create an ambient light with ambient shade set to 0

Arthur Ramazanov

Thanks Claydough, chronic, and elementrix for your help - I'll give it a try right now

Arthur Ramazanov

wow claydough thank you so much it worked - It's such a simple solution - thank you

Arthur Ramazanov

Also elementrix thank you this works as well