Transparent Materials-need advice!

[Murphz]

Hey Again fellow irrlichters ,

Simple queston. Best way to produce Tranparancy with out code.

I'm an artist and wondering if i can get good results by playing with the alpha maybe.

I have tried doing this in 3dsmax in the B3D brush material. (lowered the alpha) but it is simply too bright ... with a little transparancy.

Being able to lightmap the transparant objects would be cool too as I have the rest of the mesh.

Any advice on these matters?

[MasterM]

Best way to produce Tranparancy with out code.

You need to learn code to produce transparancy the way you want but then again you can always look for a transparent code snippit in this forum(dont know if there is any).

[Strong99]

I think you have to look at irrEdit to export an irr file with lightmaps and transparancy. This way you don't have to code it directly

[Mel]

If you can program at least a enough to use irrlicht, you can program some simple code try programming your own shaders, it is not that hard. I thought it at first, but i tried, and now, i do my own, so mo models look and the rendering works just as i want

[Murphz]

Thanks again for your advice folks.

Fortutnately I work along side a great programer but we were hoping to reduce the dependancy on code for this type of visual...+ as an artist/ & visually, I want control of the overall effect.

I want to know if there is a happy balance between the two or if one can use one or the other as an output into irrlicht.

@Mel-- Shaders would be the way to go but we are working towards the iphone as a platform, I dont think it supports shaders.

@Strong99-- I'll look into this. I really want total control of the visual affect the transparancy will have. I want to make use of textures if plausible.. will this approach have the effect I want...?

....The comparison I make is related towards the irredits lightmapper.
I was really impressed by the results but ultimately it did'nt give me total control of how the light maps were produced..

They were very productive once used with binary encoding the resulting lightmap_mesh. But with 3dsmax and vray, placing lights with ease.+loads of options... I got great results mixing the light maps and Gi maps ... Visually i would'nt of got near with irredit's lightmapper.


..As an artist i want this same control.artists and programmers alike your advice and views on this subject please...
If the best results is a mixture of both disiplines , and is the most affective then so-be,

What is everyones thoughts on this matters.

Please dont feel constrained by what I speak of above but transparancy in general or all things akin would be great

Thanks again Irrlicht loving the work !!

Murphz

[dlangdev]

You can get very good results with textures using diffuse and specular maps. Baking ambient in the diffuse will produce much better render.

From there you can step into the shader programming, adding normal and parallax mapping effects. Note that once you take this route you will not be able to use lightmapping.