Grayscale opacity in TP5?

[Mohawk20]

Just wondering if the TP5 update has grayscale opacitymap support, or will it still cut the grayscale to black and white?

[Oshyan]

There has been no change in this area as far as I am aware. In general any notable update will be recorded in the change log we post with each release.

- Oshyan

[Mohawk20]

Okay, thanks.

Do you have any idea when this issue will be addressed?

[Tangled-Universe]

Interesting remark Mohawk, I too "miss" this kind of functionality so far. It is especially interesting for using slightly lower opacity in certain areas of leaves. Especially cool when you do close-up work of models.

Martin

[Mohawk20]

Indeed, I need it for some transparency maps on poser figures, like hair and stuff. It would also be more render efficient to use for glass, a reflective plate, with half opacity, in stead if a water shader that need to calculate depth, sss and other stuff.

[Tangled-Universe]

Indeed, I need it for some transparency maps on poser figures, like hair and stuff. It would also be more render efficient to use for glass, a reflective plate, with half opacity, in stead if a water shader that need to calculate depth, sss and other stuff.

I wish sss was already available

[Matt]

We have not yet scheduled a fix for this problem in the current rasterizing/scanline renderer. But I am considering making it optional to render vegetation entirely using the ray tracer in some future version after 2.0 to improve anti-aliasing, and our ray tracer already supports greyscale opacity/transparency (which can be seen in shadows and reflections).

[cyphyr]

... and our ray tracer already supports greyscale opacity/transparency (which can be seen in shadows and reflections).

It dose? How do I impliment that. I did some tests a while ago (this release) and transparent surfaces rendered with entirely opaque shadows, am I missing something? The shadow was the same nomatter wether the casting surface was 1% or 100% transparent.
Richard

[Mohawk20]

Thanks for that info Matt.

One question, I made the render below a few versions back, and you can see there's something wrong with the hair. It's basically multiple layers of bend rectangles, with image maps and opacity maps. The edges of the opacity maps are mostly gray and clip to white in this render, showing hard cornered edges. Will this be fixable with the ray tracer-only thing you mentioned?

[Matt]

... and our ray tracer already supports greyscale opacity/transparency (which can be seen in shadows and reflections).

It dose? How do I impliment that. I did some tests a while ago (this release) and transparent surfaces rendered with entirely opaque shadows, am I missing something? The shadow was the same nomatter wether the casting surface was 1% or 100% transparent.
Richard

Oops... yes, you are correct. Semi-transparency isn't working in the ray tracer either, but it will be simpler to get this working eventually.

Matt

[Matt]

Thanks for that info Matt.

One question, I made the render below a few versions back, and you can see there's something wrong with the hair. It's basically multiple layers of bend rectangles, with image maps and opacity maps. The edges of the opacity maps are mostly gray and clip to white in this render, showing hard cornered edges. Will this be fixable with the ray tracer-only thing you mentioned?

Yes, it think it would probably be fixed by the changes I mentioned, but it will still be some time before I can work on that.

Matt