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​Arnold Render Refraction to Alpha Issue

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Message 1 of 8
LatifGhouali
606 Views, 7 Replies

​Arnold Render Refraction to Alpha Issue

Arnold Render Refraction to Alpha Issue

Hi everyone, i would like to address some issue I'm facing with Arnold render! I love this amazing renderer but I should confess that sometimes I find it really difficult to achieve such basic features that used to be second nature with other renderer ...( i have used Mental ray, Lightwave, Modo, Octane, Vray, Keyshot in the past 20 years ).

The main issue on my current project is to render glass material with refraction information in the Alpha channel for further composition...all I'm getting is the full white over black alpha whatever the transparency of the material used ...

I already tried the uncheck opaque in the Arnold properties / transmit To AOV checked / float to rgba in the custom backplate as suggested by one of the forum posts....and nothing seems to work ....

My second issue is the round corner features as using it with a glass material completely change how the refraction/transparency look.

And the third one is seems to be a bug that never has been solved apparently: Material disappearing from the Mix Shader as the slots appear empty every time i reload the scene? i faced this problem during a tight deadline project in

the past which made the experience painful ...the only solution i found is to export to the library each material of the mix shader and reload them on each scene reload for multiple object ...

As much as i love Arnold, I confess its drive me crazy why it's so difficult sometimes to do simple stuff, like export material/objects ID without dealing with Cryptomate, or just export the AO without passing by the slate material editor for each object ...

Thanks.

Regards.

7 REPLIES 7
Message 2 of 8

What version of MAXtoA are you using? The disappearing shaders was fixed in 2.2.956



// Stephen Blair
// Arnold Renderer Support
Message 3 of 8
Message 4 of 8
LatifGhouali
in reply to: LatifGhouali

Hi Stephen and thank you so much for the fast reply ...

I'm using 2.2.960

actually, there is another issue with the Mix shader, clicking the slot to load material from the library, load nothing inside it, sometimes its load but once you click away, its shows no mat on the slot ...

Regarding the Alpha/refraction issue and while testing I finally got the proper Alpha refraction to show in using The RGBA AOV, in the Activeshade, but surprisingly it still showing full white when using the production render after importing in After effects, EVEN exporting the A-AOV, shows full white on black ...

Message 5 of 8

Again, what version is the question? Arnold 5.2.2.0 had a fix for round corners not working with transmission. So if you're on an older version, it's worth getting the latest MAXtoA.



// Stephen Blair
// Arnold Renderer Support
Message 6 of 8
LatifGhouali
in reply to: LatifGhouali

Its showing currently installed version MAXtoA : 2.2.960, available version : 2.2.3

Message 7 of 8

Ok, I'll test the Mix shader and open a ticket...or come back here if I need more info to repro



// Stephen Blair
// Arnold Renderer Support
Message 8 of 8
LatifGhouali
in reply to: LatifGhouali

HI Stephen, i finally managed to fix the Refraction Issue in Production Render also, after analysing the difference between ActiveShade and Production Render, I found that all the setting were the same, the only difference was that Background/backplate was set to custom Color ( black by default ) in Production render in opposition to custom map ( empty slot ) in the Active Shade !

Conclusion: Backplate need to be set to custom map with an empty slot as putting map inside it will ignore the refraction on transparent Object again...

I just downloaded the latest Arnold version. I confirm that the round edge on transmissive material works perfectly.

however, the disappearing material on mix shader remains the same...

Thanks.

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