change black colour to transparent?

# 1 05-03-2011 , 06:11 PM

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Hi, I got a texture which is brilliant for my project and wish to have the black colour on it transparent. Is there anyway to insert it as a jpg and have maya workout where there is black, its transparent?

Thanks

Mark

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# 2 05-03-2011 , 08:39 PM

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well you need to have an alpha channel. however, jpegs wont support an alpha channel so you should use a tiff.

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# 3 05-03-2011 , 08:58 PM

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If you use a jpeg, just go to the color balance of the file and turn on "Alpha is luminance". As far as Maya figuring out where the black areas are of a texture that is more than just a black and white image, I don't know.

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# 4 05-03-2011 , 09:17 PM

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I'm trying to do it without an alpha channel cause its a map of clouds and Will be tedious to recreate, looking for a shortcut, like saying using 'darken' layer style in photoshop to make the white invisible...

Thanks user added image

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# 5 05-03-2011 , 11:01 PM

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Can you post a screen shot of the texture?

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# 6 06-03-2011 , 12:37 AM

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Thanks Perfecto! Your method worked! user added image

I'm still used to texturing cause I always specialised in modelling... Texturing and Lighting is still pretty new for me.

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Last edited by Masteryoda; 06-03-2011 at 12:42 AM.

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# 7 06-03-2011 , 02:24 AM

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I'm still pretty new to texturing myself but if we keep practicing we'll both get better and better. I'm glad you got it working. Good luck with the rest of your project.

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Exceed Expectations!

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# 8 06-03-2011 , 09:24 AM

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Defiantly

Thanks a lot for your help Perfecto. After 4 years not touching Maya, I'm back on 3D again

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# 9 06-03-2011 , 10:47 AM

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you dont need an alpha channel to do this, when a format like tiff is connected to the colour of a matterial if an alpha is detected it will automatically hook it up to the transparency for you. You can go into the connection editor and delete this automatic association at any point.

If you bring in your texture jpg to the hypershade you will see a whole group of colour math nodes which will give you the result you want without working with photoshop. To make darker areas more transparent you need to invert the image so use an invert node then if you want to have more control play with gamma/ contrast nodes to get the result you want. A nice one to use is the set range node. when you hook this up you need to set the original range coming in and then the new range.

E.g. the orignal image will have a range of 0-1 so if you set the new range to be 0.5 to 1 the image will be alot brighter. Note you can scale this out of visible bounds to doing a range of -1 to 1 will make everything that was below 50% gray black. This is usefull for getting nice control.

Just hook the output of this into your transparency, use the ipr to tweak your values.
You can use alpha is luminance but you might find it easier for the brain to use rgb to luminance node.

Hope this helps.

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# 10 06-03-2011 , 12:05 PM

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Mmmm, I just wouldn't use a tiff, maya isnt a fan despite what is said, use a targa

J

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# 11 06-03-2011 , 12:20 PM

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oh, that cloud map you can just plug into the transparency. are you using the 16k version of the colour maps? it will slow your computer down loads and take a long time to render. Just a heads up.

here is the link if anyone else is interested.
https://www.shadedrelief.com/natural3.../textures.html

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# 12 06-03-2011 , 12:22 PM

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LOL 16k ahahahaha....why???

cheers for the link Dom

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# 13 06-03-2011 , 12:22 PM

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Mmmm, I just wouldn't use a tiff, maya isnt a fan despite what is said, use a targa

J

Originally Posted by Jay

tiffs are fine as long as there is no compression. what other problems would there be?

16k i know!, i did actually use them as 16k recently. i converted to TEX, worked fine. user added image

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# 14 06-03-2011 , 05:07 PM

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Just uses alot of your RAM, you can do tiled rendering if you run into memory issues down the line. But to be honest 16k is HUGE. if your rendering at 2048 pixels across no texture resolution should be much bigger than 2k and thats at close up.

TEX is the same as tiff by the way, just a format made to work with render man, but also works with other renderers.

Tiff is a strange format, its not one size fits all it comes in many different flavors. TEX is a good to use as its still tiff but it will ensure it behaves expectedly.

I like taga too, its nice and simple.

FX supervisor - double negative

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