I’m sure this is pretty simple and I hope this question makes sense. I want to place a logo in Blender’s 3d environment. I will be using a .png or .psd as the logo. I don’t need the logo to be on a 3d surface, a 2d plane would be ok. I know how to trace a logo and apply the logo as a texture, but I’m wondering if there’s an easier way. Can I put the logo on a plane and tell Blender that I only want to see the area of the plane that contains the logo? If so, how can I accomplish that?
you can easily do this by opening the logo in an image manipulation software such as photshop and the GIMP and remove all the background color and set it to transparent. Save the picture as a PNG file and then load it in blender as a texture. under the texturepanel, enable ‘use alpha’.
under the materialpanel, click on Z-trans and drap the alpha value all the way to zero.
that should work.
Thanks for the help. Your solution solves that problem, but it seems to have created a new one. The logo was placed in the scene where some particles are moving around in front of the logo. When Z-trans is selected on the logo it cuts through the particles between the logo and camera. It’s like the particles have a hole cut out in the shape of the logos. Any idea how to fix that?
This picture show what I mean. The particles are actually in front of the logos.
<-- will be watching this one, I have run into that problem myself.
I am not sure, but try disable Z-trans, and use ray-traced transparency(ray-transp) instead.
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RayTrans allows the particles to be shown when they are closer to the camera than the plane with transparency, but no particles show behind the plane, even where the plane is transparent.
I tried different settings of z-invert, z-offset, raytrans filters, spectra settings, etc. and cannot get the particles to show properly.
It’s weird that if you use an Image mapped to a plane with UseAlpha only the particles behind render. If you use CalcAlpha all particles render. I reckon this is a bug.
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This is pretty frustrating. Is there really no way to do this?
ok, so when all the geeks have tried to solve your problem, and you are almost ready to give up in despair, this is where I jump in with my work-arounds. What I can think of is to render once with settings that show the particles in front, but render ONLY the particles. Then render again with settings that show the particles in back. Then use Compositing Nodes to AlphaOver or Mix the two sequences.
Will I be able to have the particles bouncing off of the logos if the logos are not in the scene for the particle only render?
My workaround for this problem given the simplicity of the logo is to model the geometry, ie. cut out the transparent sections completely, this may eliminate the need for any raytracing in your render which may speed things up as well.
Thanks everybody for your help. I’m going with Hazard’s suggestion. It seems like the simplest remedy to me.
My suggestion is to use an older 2.3X version that had the Unified Render option in F10 specifically to deal with particle problems like this.
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