Overwrite with Global Alpha Value when also using Map To Alpha Button

Support Compositing and Post Processing
1

Here is the situation:

we have a texture for a button as text with a transparent background
we use the Map to Alpha Button to render the background transparent.

Well the texture affects the Material Alpha value now.

However when you animate the Material Alpha you can now only animate
the alpha value and the background would change from transparent to solid.
BUT the text will always stay visible.

And this all should be animated.

Any idea or tip how one could get this done?

2

I´ve ran into this as well.
I worked around it by animating the material alpha AND the texture color/alpha simultaniously in 2.49.
I don´t really know if there is another way. In 2.50 it might be nice to try a driver to drive all 3 values with a custom prop.
It might also be possible with a node material which only controls the alpha value of everything “beneath” it.

hth

3

how did you animate the texture alpha??? where?

4

In 2.5 it´s painfully obvious (simply insert keyframes for it in the texture tab for those reading here not aware of it) so I guess you mean 2.49 =)

Unfortunately the production I had to use it in are in the office and the remote machine´s down so I couldn´t look exactly and I feel like a strange tourist in 2.49 in terms of animation suddenyl. Been in 2.5 for too long already. I had a company logo on the side of a caterpillar track and had to make it transparent in order to see into the machine and the first tries the logo texture was very persistent to be seen =)

But IIRC there is no way you can animate the alpha directly, you got to go to the IPO editor and add a IPO for the COL and simply use the same curve you use for the material alpha animation.
Taking out the color of the texture with turned on map to alpha will result in zero opacity with color 0.

Another important thing:
you should also animate spectrans of the material in the mirror trans tab> raytraced transperancy collumn at the bottom.
Once it is fully transparent, the specularity will still be there unless you animate it to 0 as well which is a PITA as you usually see it after rendering an animation and IMO its the hardest usability/interface fail in all of 2.49… it makes no sense it is there =D