The application of separate material to a fur material is not responding as anticipated. ie. texture maps do not appear on the fur strips only solid colour. I am assuming I would create the applied material to fit a surface 1x1 parametrically so it sits on each fur strand.
It seems to work fine in the material preview, but fail in a render...
Hi Robert,
If you look again at my example you will see that I used a JPEG and it did work as a stencil the same way it does in modo. I think the problem that you and other were seeing (glowing edges) happens when you try to use opacity map and not the layered method that I showed.
JF
Sorry Jerry, I understand this, I just wanted to link to the other thread because it seemed they were talking about the same issue of mapping a material onto fur blades.
Although you do mention the modo version... looking at thier shader tree they seem to use a noisy jpeg for thier stencil. Are they modifying that stencil layer with some sort of histogram modifier to clean up the jpeg ie force black and white?
Here's the deal modo 401 does not support RGB Alpha (501 will) so we automatically create a proper stencil ( not a noisy jpeg one). This being said you can still do precisely what you are asking for by using Alpha layer in the material editor. I used a JPEG for the alpha just to show this does work even with JPEG. In the Map Editor you see Leaf_Alpha this is a black and white image where what I want to see (the leaf) is white and the rest of the image is black ( think of this image as our stencil in modo land).
As you can see I set the blend mode to Alpha for this layer and I create a layer for my leaf (Leaf_A.tif) I drag this layer below the Alpha layer and I am using no back ground ( that will render transparent). Now you can change the texture to whatever you like see example1 below where I used Wood Chesnut Crown (now I have wooden leaves).
Hi Jerry,
Yes these are jpgs from the luxology asset site (I inverted the stencil/mask file), and I can see that combining them in photoshop to create a TIFF with alpha or transparency works. However if we are using the Luxology Engine and picking up Luxology lxp materials (that use jpgs as a stencil) surely we should be able to too use jpgs too...or are they simply using the sencil jpg as a transparency map and not an alpha mask? I cant look inside a lxp to see how they do it.
I was hoping that I would not have resort to photoshop just to make a mask work. I take your point about the fuzzy nature of JPG files, but I would like to use a separate stencil file so that I can swap out the diffues map(s) without having to resort to a photoshop edit every time.
Hi Paul - file attached as requested