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Rendering with Arnold in 3ds Max using the MaxtoA plug-in.
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Animating nParticle transparency until completely invisible

6 REPLIES 6
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Message 1 of 7
maja.divjakW2VMQ
294 Views, 6 Replies

Animating nParticle transparency until completely invisible

Hi,

I'm trying to animate nParticle transparency so that they eventually disappear. The particles are cached and have a standardSurface shader applied. I have animated the shader transmission weight to 1 and played with geometry opacity to give a nice transparent glass look, but I want the nParticles to actually completely disappear after this and I can't work out how to do this or whether it is even possible? If I take the geometry opacity slider right down to black, the nParticles turn black too, they don't actually disappear. Turning opaque on or off in the Shape node Arnold rollout has no effect. If someone could please advise how to achieve this, ie nParticle transparency and then invisibility, that would be fantastic.

Thank you in advance,

Maja

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6 REPLIES 6
Message 2 of 7

Sounds like you're hitting the maximum transparency depth (by default, it's 10).

The Opaque flag is automatically set by Arnold now, you don't need to set it.



// Stephen Blair
// Arnold Renderer Support
Message 3 of 7

thanks Stephen, so if you reach maximum transparency there's no where to go after that? ie you can't actually then make the nParticles invisible?

Message 4 of 7

@Maja Divjak You'd have to turn off transmission. Otherwise, even with opacity=0 0 0, there's transmission going on.



// Stephen Blair
// Arnold Renderer Support
Message 5 of 7

Thanks, I'll give that a go...

Message 6 of 7

Hi Stephen,

I've had a thorough play with this and cannot achieve invisibility of the nParticles. I can achieve nParticle transparency by setting transmission to 1 and geometry opacity to dark grey (there are no numeric values, only a scale from black to white). If I then set the geometry opacity to black, then all particles turn flat black. If I set transmission to 0, as you suggest and then adjust geometry opacity from white to black, the result is nParticles from grey to flat black. Please see attached images Is it actually possible to make the nParticles transparent and then invisible please?

Thanks so much and best wishes,

Maja

transmission-1-geometryopacity-darkgrey.jpg

transmission-1-geometryopacity-black.jpg

transmission-0-geometryopacity-white.jpg


transmission-0-geometryopacity-black.jpg

Message 7 of 7

In case anyone is interested, set your Arnold standardSurface shader transmission weight to 0 and animate the geometry opacity from white to black. The key is increasing the Ray Depth > Transparency Depth in the Arnold render settings a lot, in my case from 10 to 150. The particles are animated from visible to invisible. No more black nParticles.

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