Help urgent! Vray and textures with alpha on transparent materials!!

[dsp_418]

Hi there,

 

really in a hurry, sorry for posting as urgent, but it actually is

I'm having a hard time trying to set up a material in Max + VRay.

 

Basically I've a plane, I want to add a texture map with alpha, and this is the first obstacle. This textures are just logos. I'm importing photoshop files, sometimes they work sometimes they don't. When they work I can see the alpha map applied correctly, when they don't I see the logo but everything is white around them. Some other times the logo is cut! (like only the top half is rendered).

 

The second obstacle is that I'd like to have reflection and refraction on the plane and on top of that add a gradient to the opacity to drive the opacity of the texture. Sounds complex, and so far it is as I couldn't always get the proper result!

 

I'm attaching two screen grabs. Sorry, they're very small and only very little portion of the image, I can't post more as this is a WIP for a commercial project.

 

Ok, the wrong result: the lower part, the left angle, doesn't look like a glass. That's the logo with the alpha that doesn't work properly.

 

This part of the image works just fine. You can see part of the logo, alpha is working and there's a subtle gradient from top to bottom (dark to bright), and that's the gradient map I'm using in the opacity channel.

 

Help!

[Corey Beaulieu]

For this I usually do 2 things. Set up the material as the material you want it to ultimately be, in your case the reflective|refractive|gradient|etc... and then I would, in PS make the logo and save it as a .gif.

 

Place the logo in the standard map called "mask" and then place another version of it in the mask portion. On the mask portion, the bitmap needs to be switched to the mono channel output of Alpha the mask map goes into your diffuse channel. I would also make sure that your bitmaps (both of them) are not set to tile. You should be able to UVW map for the logo and then any non-logo areas will read the material you setup.

 

Sorry if this is all confusing, but this is the only way I know to do it.

[dsp_418]

Thanks for helping Corey.

So basically the gif is for the alpha channel only, I guess I can use a PNG as well. Also, where should I plug the Mask map into? Does it goes into the opacity map?

Thanks!

[Corey Beaulieu]

the gif is just because that is the way it worked out for me. I know that file type to store alpha and so I used it. Try anything you'd like.

 

The Mask actually goes into the diffuse channel. What happens is that the logo only exists inside your alpha and the rest falls onto the material itself. So if you setup the material how you want it everywhere else that is what will appear outside the alpha mask.

[dsp_418]

Great, I'll try that.

Thank you so much Corey for your prompt help!

[Corey Beaulieu]

No problem. I hope it all works out.