I’ve been trying to figure out how to add transparency to a mesh in Cycles - and I had found a Blender project online that while it demonstrates exactly what I’m trying to do, it was done in Blender Render
I’ve attempted to convert the project (or at least the mesh/material/texture portion that demonstrates the alpha transparency) to work under Cycles (using nodes), but I seem to have hit a brick wall in doing so (can’t get it to work).
Any suggestions on what I might be overlooking? I’m running Blender v2.78, by the way.
You are correct - sorry about that. Let me try to be more specific…
First, I started with Google and searched on YouTube for any videos covering Blender 2.7x Cycles with using the Alpha channel- but the best I was able to find concerned using image files on stand-alone meshes using nodes.
Secondly I searched this forum (Materials and Textures) to see if anyone had run into a similar issue, but still found nothing that would cover this particular situation.
Resorting to the YouTube examples I had previously found, I attempted to set up in Nodes what I thought I had understood would duplicate the effect under Blender Render- but failed to achieve this.
To be precise - I’m attempting to understand how the same effect that I’m seeing under Blender Render for a given mesh using textures/material can be configured for the Cycles Render engine. I know it has to be a configuration issue with Nodes, but after researching this, I’m at a loss to find out what I’m doing wrong.
Attached is the blender file that I had mentioned in my previous post that I was using for this (with associated texture files packed) - I had removed what I hope to be all non-relevant objects in the original .blend file to trim the file down to a reasonable size.
Below is a screenshot of what I’m seeing - the original author of this file has mentioned in his notes (highlighted) referring to the bangs of the figure being semi-transparent. And while this was true under Blender Render, I am unable to duplicate this effect under Cycles.
The material is not set up to use transparency. With mix factor of 0 it only uses diffuse. The other reason is that Cycles viewport behaves very differently from what Blender render can do. It can’t preview material translucency shader in material viewport shading mode, would have to use render preview for it.
And this is the Cycles equivalent. Could also use math node between alpha and factor to influence the overall transparency. The material is made shadeless with emission, and only having the object visible to the camera. Latter can also be controlled per material with light path node.
Controlling the material transparency needs to be done if the object is rendered. The viewport material preview and render preview show a different result.
Thanks! I was able to reproduce the node setup and resulting effect you had outlined on my copy of the .blender file- and thanks also for the explanation. After studying it I think I have a much better idea of what’s going on.
