I wonder if it is possible to make a .png image a bit transperent? Not just the corners/parts as is done when making leafs and such. I mean the whole image slightly transparent.
I made the lamp with green shade and iron foot, but instead of having the shade made out of a glass node with some roughness I would like to use a image texture and make that slightly seethrough.
The idea is for the lampshade to be like a tiffanylamp (Stainedglass lampshade and brass foot) without having to make the shade in lots of little pieces and colour them with nodes.
The lamp is for a game and it would be so much easier to create new lampshades with an image instead of making all the little glass tiles seperatly, not to mention the polycount that will be a lot less if it was made with a picture.
/wave Maqea
Hey! Im a newbie and I’m not sure if I got it right but you want to combine an image texture with a transparent/glass shader right? If yes you should be able to drop your glass tile texture into a standard image node and when using the principled shader simply turn on the transparency. Now you could adjust the roughness within the principled shader. Hope this is what you need
Just google sg like “blender cycles transparent material”. This is a very basic thing so you can imagine this has been asked and answered a million times.
Above you’ll find an example. I’ve unwrapped a cube and removed the two side walls. The yellow strips are 75% transparent. and the red 50%. The squares in between are completely transparent, i.e. 100% alpha. The black borders are 50% transparent, too.% alpha. The world background is light blue. The image is packed into the blend file. I hope this is somewhat helpful!
Also, if you’re going to use the principled shader instead of a glossy or diffuse (or any other kind), it’s better to use a a black and white or fac value going into the transmission slot rather than an alpha value. But I’ve noticed the normals seem to be inverted when you use the transmission slot, if so, just mark the appropriate face(s) and flip normals.
The principled shader may be the problem here, as the fresnel is same for front and back sides. This is very convenient for thin stuff like leaves, but I never use it for transparent or refractive stuff. There is nothing magical about an alpha channel, it’s just another signal channel you can manipulate and use however you see fit.
