Using Transparency on a few objects...

#1

I was wondering if there is a way to select certain parts of a character and apply a transparency shader to have only that part transparent? I have no issue making the whole character transparent, I just need a certain portion (glass) to be transparent. I’m not too sure how to replace the lighted or flat shader to the original shader for that certain part…FYI the glass shader is a procuderal material from Maya, so no map. Any ideas?!?

#2

Hi there

From what I understand about motion builder, you need to apply a shader to your material before transparencies can be seen in the view port. I have done this by dragging a Lighted shader from the Shader folders in my Asset Browser to the model in the view port. It then asks if I want to replace the shader on this model, I clicked on replace all. Now in the Lighted shader properties I set the Transparency Type drop down to Translucent. Now, by adjusting the Opacity slider in the MATERIAL applied to the model, I can control how transparent it is in the view port.

Like I said, I don’t know if this is the best way of doing this, but its how I did it.

~;o)

#3

A character and a model are very different concepts in MoBu. You can have one character made out of separate pieces of geometry (example: a knight wearing armor). You apply materials and shaders on a per-model basis. In short - if you can select this part as a separate object (or separate mesh) in your scene then you can apply whichever shader you like on it.Otherwise you have to apply them to the whole mesh. Hope I was clear enough :slight_smile: If you have questions just ask.

#4

I think my situation is a bit different. I have a cell phone with tennis shoes and cartoonish gloves. It has different materials for each part of the model, but the cellphone itself is one piece. So I guess I have to bring in the model without combining the geo or I’m just screwed. Any ideas?!? Thanks for the help!!

#5

I brought in the model with seperate pieces and was able to get the transparency to work. Thanks for the advice!

#6

Just to wrap up… In Motion Builder you can only apply materials and shaders to objects/models/geometry whatever you want to call them, there is no concept of faces like in MAYA.

#7

To be more precise you CAN have two shaders on one object (when you assign a shader choose “Append”), but they are layered one on top of the other. The last one you apply is on the top of the “stack”. There is much to be said about shaders and materials in MoBU, but this is getting dangerously offtopic :slight_smile:

#8

I’m having success now with my models…fortunatley i dont have models that have two or more textures on a single piece of geometry. The only reason for this texture madness is because we will be doing realtime rendering so everything has to be as awesome as possible…i usually dont care and have the pastey gray look on all my characters becuase I take 'em back into Maya. It would be nice though to learn more about materials/shaders/texture maps in MB. Thanks for the help fellas ! :thumbsup:

#9

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