Hello! I’m trying to make an insect wing and I need it be partially transparent with the veins more opaque. It’s all one subtool and I can’t figure out how to make it work because whatever I try just makes the whole thing transparent. I’ve been looking for an answer and I found something about BPR transparency by color but unfortunately I can’t get it to work. I think if there was a way to apply a transparency map like in maya that would be wonderful but I haven’t found out how to do that in ZBrush. Any help would be greatly appreciated!
It is interesting to me too.
You can do it like this:
- For the SubTool you want transparent, turn on Tool>Display Properties>BPR Transparent Shading.
- Turn on Render>Render Properties>Transparent.
- To modulate the transparency by color:
(a) set the Render>BPR Transparency>Strength to 0
(b) set the Render>BPR Transparency>ByColor to 1 - Make sure you have a texture map applied, or the SubTool is polypainted.
You can experiment with different values for Render>BPR Transparency>ByColor and Render>BPR Transparency>CFactor to get the effect you want. The effect will depend on the colors used in the texture/polypaint, with black being completely transparent and white completely opaque. I don’t think it is possible to reverse that.
I’ve attached a sample project that you can take a look at. To export the texture I have used, press Tool>Texture Map>Clone Txtr and then export from the Texture palette.
Download project:
Attachments
TranspSubTool.zip (84.7 KB)
Thanks a ton! I was getting rather frustrated but your advice did the trick.
Hello. I thought everything was going swell and then I noticed that the transparency wasn’t actually working quite right. I have two subtools for each pair of wings. I’m running into problems with both the way the wings in each pair interact with each other and the way the pairs interact with each other. At first I only noticed the problem with the individual pairs of wings, which I thought could be easily fixed by making each wing its own subtool rather than having them in pairs. However, because of the problem with the way the different subtools interact it looks like that won’t work. If anyone has any idea what could be causing this anomaly I would greatly appreciate their advice!
The first image just shows what it looks like before being BPR preview rendered and the second one is the BPR preview render. Notice how were the wings overlap odd things are happening with the transparency.
I’d have to see the project to see what’s going wrong there. I’ll PM you.