Using Alphas to Simulate See Through Cloth

[Whipyo]

Your alpha channel has basically gotta be black where you are cutting out (removing) pixels and white where you are showing.

There are heaps of different ways to do this.

Probably the first way to try is look at your individual channels. You are looking for a channel that has good contrast between the areas you want to remove and show. If you find a suitable channel, copy this and use it as a starting point for creating your alpha. You can use all sort of tools and filters on this copied alpha. I would try using levels to get the most black/white contrast and you can use brushes too.

Another method you can use is by using colour range. Play around with this to see how it works. This will create a selection which you will need to convert to a channel by using select/save selection. You can then select your channel and edit it with brushes etc to get your black/white contrast.

This is probably a pretty vague explanation but as I mentioned there are so many methods and techniques that I could write a novel about it.

Good luck!

[NyneDown]

haha....I'd be the first in line to buy your novel man, who do I make my check payable to?:P

Anyway, joking aside, I totally follow you on the various ways to get an alpha channel within photoshop. From my understanding, from this point I just copy the channel and paste it into a new layer, then save that as a jpeg, targa...whatever my preference is and BAM, I have the alpha channel I need, right? If I'm missing a crucial step...please enlighten me man. Also, I hate to start a new thread in the Alias/Maya forum just for this question....so I'll ask it here sense it pertains to what I'm trying to figure out. With that alpha channel, where would I plug it in at once I'm inside of Maya? The transparency node or the translucency...or would it be C) None of the above? I definitely need to expirement more with this stuff...but I really do appreciate your straight forward answers.

[Whipyo]

You shouldnt use the channel as a layer.

For my 3d app (Cinema 4D), I save my image as an RGB in whatever format with no extra layers or channels.

Then seperately I save my channel as a new document just for the alpha.

To create your new doc from your alpha channel, go to the channels palette in PS, highlight your channel and click the little triangle at the top rhs of the palette. Select 'duplicate channel' and in the dialogue which comes up, under destination select 'new'. This will create a new greyscale document containing only your alpha channel.

If maya supports greyscale format, you can save the file as is. If not, just convert the document mode to RGB as then save.

There are other ways of doing this, this is only how I do it.

Anyway, as far as where to use it in Maya, I'm not sure. In C4D I would use it in the 'alpha' slot. I'm sure the friendly people here at CG Talk wouldn't mind you posting a new thread as it is a legitimate Maya question.

Good luck!

Whipyo

[NyneDown]

Okay...I should've "experimented" first before I replied the first time, but I ran a couple of tests and got some pretty nice results. I so thought that was going to be alot more difficult...ha! Thanks again for the explanations man!


*Edit*...I was replying right when you were, apparently, but I did exactly what I wasnt supposed to as far as using the channel as a layer is concerned. I actually just copied it and pasted in a new layer, made some adjustments and saved that for my alpha as a jpeg. Then saved the RGB seperately....I was just missing that one little piece to the puzzle. In maya I just plugged it into the transparency channel....I tried the translucency but it didnt do anything. But thanks for the heads up dude!

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