I have an image, which is just white text with a transparent backgound, that I want to add to a material so the text shows up on my object. I’m inexperienced with cycles & eevee so I’m not sure where I am going wrong at. Here’s a screenshot of what I have:
The image is added with a mix shader and the alpha of the image is connected to the factor of the mix shader. This appears to work fine in brightly lit environments, but under dim lighting conditions, the text is too bright:
Here I put a cube around around my object, camera & lights to block environment lighting, and as you can see the text is way too bright. Manually adjusting the factor of the mix shader will adjust the brightness of the image, but how to add the image so I don’t have to adjust the factor? How can I make it so the image is as bright as the object it appears on?
im guessing the issue is that your images node runs directly into the mix shader node, my first try would be to run the image into normal mix node (not mix shader) mix it there with whatever color your object should be and that mix node into a regular diffuse shader or principled shader node and that directly to the material output
You are correct, Sir!
I forgot to pack the image. I packed the image and re-uploaded the file on the first post. Is there someplace in the user prefs to set it to always pack images?
I thought about this, and sure, I was mixing things up. I was plugging an image into a mix shader, and I shouldn’t be doing that.
So I plugged the image into a diffuse shader and connected that to the mix shader:
I have made some changes to your .blend file. I’m not sure if I did it right (I just tried to experiment with it a bit), but from what I’ve got, it seems to me that the visibility of your text onto your object now depends on the light spots that are around it. I made a comparison slider so that you may see the difference in a clearer way.
TBH, I wasn’t sure what I was looking at in the image with the comparison slider you posted. So I donwloaded your file and rendered it. Then I appended in my material and rendered.
And now I see the difference, my material is on the left, yours on the right. Your material recieves light from the TEST POINT LIGHT, mine doesn’t. Well, my base material doesn’t get lit from the test light, but the text does get light from the test lamp. Now I am wondering why that is… any thoughts?
I’m on a cheap computer with integrated intel GPU, so that won’t help me much. I really need a higher spec machine.
I had to disconnect your old nodes, such as Fresnel and Glossy BSDF. They’re all somehow effects on the reflection of the material. Maybe that’s the case.
Correct if I’m wrong, but I think it works like it should be.
Here’s my nodes once again:
I have applied Shade Smooth to your CaseBottom.
I also had to switched from CPU to GPU in order to get better performance on my machine and turned off both Noise Threshold options for Viewport and Render as well.
So I think I figured out where I was going wrong at. I was using a Mix Shader node to combine the image texture with the other shaders. Replacing that with an Add Shader node appears to fix my problem.
The Fresnal, Diffuse, Glossy and the Mix shader that combines them are from a material I have in a file someplace… Anyway, I added in the Noise Texture and Displacement node to give the case the slightly rough look of computers at that time. Using the Add Shader node to combine the image with the other shaders works because I guess I want to add the image shader to the other shaders, instead of mixing them.
There are still some errors, but I think I can correct them, and they are errors that only show up on close in shots. So I’m not that concerned about them.
Thanks @goorman for the tip about the point test light, very useful!!!
