I tried to fade out a sphere smoothly using a texture.
I want to have a center sphere which is opaque and only the border (may 25%) of the sphere should fade out to transparent very smoothly.
I used a color ramp and tried to play with the sliders but unfortunately I could not fade out the sphere smoothly (see attached image).
The transition form the sphere to black (transparent) is not smooth it is hard somehow.
How can I achieve a smooth fade out but keep a opaque center?
I used that already in 2.5 as you can see in the screenshot.
There I used the color ramp with alpha. But I can move the slider where I want there is still a hard transition between border of sphere and backgrund.
If I increase the transparent area of the ramp, the sphere just gets smaller, so more from the sphere is faded out, but the transition between opaque and transparent is still hard not smooth.
Attached is a blend file that uses a blend texture and alpha is mapped to Normal viewing direction from the camera so the Sphere gets more alpha transparent towards its outer edge. Also did another blend file which fade the sphere in the middle rather than the outside.
You can fade out a plane using a blend texture that way but not sphere. To get that effect on a sphere you could set the texture to volume and apply the blend texture to Density. I keep getting error messages when I try to upload files to the forums, so I can’t give you a .blend but here is a brief description:
Set material to Volume, Density to 0.
Add a new blend texture, activate Ramp under Colors. Under Influence, change Emission Col to Density. Under Blend change to Spherical.
This should work on a sphere with radius 1. You’ll need to use material nodes to go more advanced.
Hey mr.burns your file worked pretty good for me, only adjusted a couple of settings, the ramp and the blend type, but even with yours I found things depends a lot on the background to see the effect.
