Maya Transparency Animation - Mental Ray - Simply Maya User Community

# 1 06-05-2015 , 08:52 PM

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Maya Transparency Animation - Mental Ray

Hi! Basically I am making an animation of a building grow - different parts grow at different times. My question is how could i go about making a textured object start as nothing on the screen and then the object appear from left to right (or top to bottom). Nothing fancy, just literally 'grow' from nothing, to all of it being there. I don't mean from transparent to translucent to opaque - I understand i could just animate the transparency for that. I need it to feel like its grown. My trouble is obviously I have textures which means I cant just animate vertices or faces as the textures become warped. Any help or advice would be much appreciated, I am sure to someone this is simple stuff..

Thanks. user added image

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# 2 07-05-2015 , 05:46 PM

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Location: Toronto

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You can put a ramp texture in the transparency channel. White will be fully transparent and black will be opaque I believe. You can animate the ramp changing over time to have your growing effect. If your material has any specular, you'll have to modify it with the same principle or you'll get floating specular highlights.

-stwert

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# 3 11-05-2015 , 10:31 AM

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Hello Stwert!

Thank you so much for your reply, I have tested your technique and managed to get things working! Really appreciate your help. I have one follow up question, and thought it would be worth asking, I hope thats okay. I have attached some pics to help explain my issue - this is just a test scene I have set up). In the scene is Maya's physical sun and sky lighting and rendering using mental ray. As you can see when the object is fully transparent there is still some shadows occurring. As the object grows the shadows grow darker (which is good) but I don't really want this ghostly shadow that is also there - it gives the game away that there is an object there which is just transparent at the start.

Any help or advice would be great, thank you!

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# 4 11-05-2015 , 06:38 PM

EduSciVis-er
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That's a peculiar issue that I don't know the answer to off-hand. Can you try with a different lighting setup and see if you have the same problem?

-stwert

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# 5 11-05-2015 , 10:44 PM

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If you're using a standard Maya shader (lambert, blinn etc) then scroll down to the shader's raytrace settings and decrease the shadow attenuation attribute down to zero.

- Genny
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# 6 14-05-2015 , 08:49 AM

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Join Date: May 2015

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Thank you!

stwert and Gen,

Thank you so much! The shadow attenuation lowered to 0.0 fixed the shadow issue. I really appreciate the help, such a great forum to get help from people who know what they are doing!

All the best! user added image

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Maya Transparency Animation - Mental Ray

Thank you!

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