Hello,
I don’t know if this is a frost or a vray problem but I made a blend shader and was using the vertex color as the mask for the two shaders, however one of the shaders was a vray shader with refraction so that it could be transparent like water, however I was not getting an alpha in the transparency when it was part of the blend material. When I applied the vray shader directly I got transparency in the alpha shader.
Anybody else notice this or run into this before? Thanks.
Frost does nothing for the actual shading, so it would be a VRay question IMHO.
When you say “no alpha”, do you mean it was fully opaque (no transparency), or fully transparent (black alpha)?
Normally, most shaders in Max that have a Refraction produce opaque Alpha because Refraction bends the ray and the color you would see through a refractive material would not be what is behind the pixel but somewhere else completely. If you would use the Alpha channel to composite a refractive material over a background, the result would make no sense if the Alpha were not opaque.
Not sure if this is related to what you are experiencing, just wanted to mention it.
Yeah, the alpha is fully opaque. when I put the shader on without it being in the blend material it returns transparency in the alpha for compositing later on. But when it’s in the blend material it’s just a solid opaque alpha.
I’m pretty sure that is a limitation of Vray.
I ran into somethign similar regarding blended transparent/refractive materials when making this:
You can get it to work with VrayBlend - the standard 3dsmax Blend doesnt work as expected/well with vray materials.
It can get a bit ‘muddy’ though. I ended up rendering a mask pass/velocity based pass for the blend that allowed me to blend the shaders in post. I rendered the liquid all one colour and then colour corrected a version of it and masked in Nuke.