My Render for a Transparent Material with Emission isn't showing up right

Artistic Support Lighting and Rendering
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So. When I Render and Export my Image to save it as a PNG Alpha.

The Boosters. Turn into a faded Clear color.
Why is it breaking like that?

2

You are running into a common problem here: most image formats like PNG can’t do additive transparency.

Explanation:

There are 2 types of transparency

-Alpha transparency. It partially hides what’s behind it, like a fog.
-Additive transparency. This one is produced by emissive materials used as volume, surfaces with emission added to transparency and bloom/glare effects. It is composed of pure light and brightens what’s behind it without hiding anything.

Most file formats only do alpha transparency and don’t capture additive. For this reason, it’s better not to render additive effects on a transparent background if you can avoid it.

Blender’s own render window is able to display it correctly, because it internally works like the EXR format, which is able to capture additive transparency correctly.

Some possible solutions:

  • If possible for your situation, don’t render on a transparent background and use the effect directly on the final background instead.
  • Save the image as EXR. It’s possible that different software will interpret the transparency slightly differently depending on how they do their color management, but it should look the same if you reimport into Blender’s own compositor or sequencer.
  • Save the flame effect in PNG, but on a black background without transparency, then composite it back over the image in add mode. That should give you back the same look once applied.
  • Use the compositor to give an actual alpha layer to the flame, based on its color gradient, so it has some alpha-based opacity to support that additive light. This will cause some of the background behind the flame to leak into the result, so the color of the sky background matters for the result (even if you don’t see it with the transparency).
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I tried Exporting it as an EXR and it turns into an unreadable File.

I’ll just have to do the Cut out effect myself then.

4

Thanks for the help though man.

5

Did you try importing the EXR back into Blender? It’s not a file format that can be read by most image viewers, but specialized 3D and compositing software can use it.