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Also, the toon brick was just something I picked at random-ish. Good idea about the if/then/else brick. Gotta learn to do everything I can save on computing power. Still don't know why my animations don't make the material do the vanishing trick when the stills do. Anybody know?
I take back my statement that the brick network might be working. Unless my understanding of how rendering works is deeply flawed (not impossible), then I should not be getting results that look like the attached.
Yeah, same here with the animations. But for the still, attached is when I applied to a sphere and checked the dot product at 0.38 (67 degrees or something like that...).
I guess I'm still scratching my head on the purpose of this. Couldn't you get cleaner and easier results using section planes in Iray?
zaezod, looks like you're just doing an OpenGL preview. I think you need to do an actual 3Delight render from the camera's perspective.
Attached is a 3Delight render I did of the sphere I showed above with my modified brick graph where all faces of the sphere at an angle of less than 67 degrees to the camera view vector are invisible, and I placed the sphere in the middle of a room scene I developed for Iray. No tweaks whatsoever to anything in the scene or any render settings, just a raw 3Delight render of an Iray scene.
You can see the red sphere is transparent according to the RSL dot product.
FWIW, I tried applying a brick texture map (via a brick texture brick) to the sphere and tweaked the dot product value to make the front faces transparent. And as can be seen below, apparently there's no backface culling going on, and the rear-facing faces of the sphere are apparently at an angle > 90 degrees, therefore not transparent.
I've also included the exact same scene rendered in Iray (no other changes other than flipping from 3Delight to Iray render engine), and apparently the RSL shading is somewhat meaningless in Iray land. I've also included my brick graph. My dot product value was set to 0.8.
This is why I said to look at the magnitude (absolute value) of the dot product.
But the existing graph does include an absolute value brick, and it takes the absolute value of the cos(theta) dot product. So if the face is facing towards the camera at, say, at theta of 45 degrees, and you've set it for transparent at that angle, why wouldn't the face that's at 90 + 45 = 135 degrees from the camera (facing away from the camera), also be transparent? Seems that since cos(45) = 0.707 and cos(135) = -0.707, then both would get absolute valued and give the same transparency.
Works for me - are you sure you had the correct shader applied (it doesn't auto-update if you make changes in Shader Mixer)?
Yeah, it works for me too in the red sphere image I posted previously, but that was only with a red color applied, not a texture image. Maybe that's the difference.
Anyway, one nice feature of the RSL graph is that, unlike the Iray/MDL graph the brick previews seem to work. Here's the previews of each step in the process.
Sure seems like there's something going on with the texture images vs just a straight color. I removed the brick texture and just used a blue color, and as you can see the rear faces are also transparent. Well, kinda. Which is strange because the opacity inputs are full white and full black.
Okay, I've copied the network (made a slight change since I was looking for making the plane I'm using disappear when I get near enough to the edges), and determined that it seems to be working for still images but I still can't get it to work for animations. It sure looks like I'm rendering the animation using 3Delight and not a preview. I've attached a picture of my render settings. I still only have 30 minutes of animation rendering experience, so I don't doubt I'm doing something wrong. The way I've got it set up, the plane is on the floor and the camera is pointing at it. The camera moves from looking at the plane close to flat on to looking at the plane close to edge on over the course of 60 seconds. In theory, the plane should be visible at the start of the animation and then disappear sometime during the animation. But whenever I render the animation, the plane never disappears, even though I know it would have disappeared in a still render taken more than a few seconds (and past that time) before the camera reaches its final position. To render, I'm hitting the blue render button at the top. What am I doing wrong?
I get the same, but I was using something that I have a rule never to use, and that's to save to a movie file rather than save as PNG's which include an alpha channel. Not sure if that's the cause, but you might save to an image sequence as PNG and see if that helps.
Yeah I think that was the problem. Here's some yummy RSL viewing angle goodness.
Works for me with an image applied, too
If you look at my previous images, it seems that the difference is that the times that the expected transparency doesn't happen, or happens just a little (like the blue sphere) is when the transparent object has a object/material in the background. And the lack of transparency in those cases seems to be affected more with a textured surface rather than a solid color. Maybe there's some interaction between that backround surface and the supposedly transparent faces? Dunno.
Okay, here's an animation that shows the issue with lack of full transparency. I'll leave it for others to figure out, since I'm sure it has to do with some inner workings of RSL which are outside my area of interest.
Okay, when I first saw the first blue plane animation, I was worried about why the blue plane in the animation didn't disappear all at once, but then I researched and realized it was likely because the rendering was done in Perspective View, not Orthographic View. In my head I was unknowingly thinking in Orthographic view, which has all the Camera rays parallel to each other, but in Perspective view the rays are at angles to each other, hence why the plane doesn't disappear all at once. (I'm sure that's something anybody who renders things often enough would take for granted, but I just picked this up recently.) Which means that the material is working correctly...except when it decided not to for reasons we still don't know. But still, thanks for the help! It's awesome to have gotten this mostly figured out. (And know it can be done in Daz and not just Blender.)
So now, besides wondering why the material fails sometimes, I'm wondering if there's a way to adjust the values/variables such that more control can be exerted over how the material disappears regardless of what viewing mode it's in? For example, if I wanted to convert the material to behave like the camera was in orthographic mode even though it was actually in perspective mode?
Also, I just thought of a potential use for this. Maybe. Lenticular Printing (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lenticular_printing#Types_of_lenticular_prints) in a Daz Scene! Or faking it, at least. (I honestly had to look up what it was called. I'd always called them holograms.) Not sure if it's the most practical way to make an Animated Poster in a Daz Scene, but it could be a cool effect all the same.