PNG Image with Alpha OVER Principled BSDF = ???

Hey All!

I’m trying to put animated 2D Textured (exported as PNG Sequence) over the base material color.

Since I’m a total noob when it comes to Blender I’m experimenting and the closes result I could come up with was “almost” there, If you’ll look carefully on the screenshot, it’s almost working but it didn’t got the WHITE part of the image.

The PNG is a simple image: Black colored eyes and mouth and fake shiny white spots.
nothing fancy for the sake of my testing.

As you can see it shows perfectly fine on the preview window, but not on the final render.
Can somebody tell me how do I make this work so it will show EVERYTHING on the Render view?

Since I’m a total noob in Blender, I’ll appreciate if you can take a screenshot or example file to explain visually, it will be much easier for me and other newcomers to understand how it works.

Thanks ahead!


I’m away from my machine and it on a small phone, but you have your image color output (yellow noodle) going into a shader slot on mix shader node (green noodle) which is not what you want. The color output should go into the color input of a bsdf shader (diffuse or princpled probably) and then that goes into the mix shade.

Thanks Photox!
I appreciate that you’re trying to help even when you’re not having Blender around, YOU ROCKS! (as always)

Sharing my result so far:
So, at first I had the textured looked weird… like it’s got light affected so I reduced the Specular on the BSDF to 0.

I’m sharing the node setup for the texture, I will change it to Sequence of course, now it’s on still for the test.

Is this the correct way? did I miss something? Any tips?
I’m just making sure so everybody else may found this useful in the future if needed.


I’m animating this rig with a 2D animated face based on lip sync audio for testing, so far it looks so nice.

The only thing I wonder about, while animating, I can’t preview the 2D Animated texture on real-time… I tried material mode but it shows the purple color instead of showing the textures when I play.

So instead of render OpenGL or low quality everytime for testing my animation progress,
Is there a way I can play it on Blender’s viewport as I animate? watching the animated PNG Sequence moving with the timeline on realtime on the viewport? (Cycles)

It could be a huge time saver! please share if you know a solution, thanks ahead!!


Just wanted to share my tiny test, it’s the first time I combine 3D and 2D… and I fall in love!
The quality is very low because of Render time, even with denoise and only 132 samples it took some time on my rusty i7 machine… but you’ll get the idea, it’s just a test anyway… I still have much more to learn as a Blender noob. :o

Enjoy: