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Home ? Importing Assets ? Import Question... what's this bit of it for?

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20/12/2011 10:37:53

DyllyMuvizu mogulExperimental user
Dylly
Posts: 555 		Can anyone tell me what this bit of Muvizu is for and how to use it? I'm sure I'm missing something useful here!
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20/12/2011 10:41:44

toonaramaMuvizu mogulExperimental user
toonarama
Posts: 661 		Dylly
Good question!

This must be a way of adding transparency and must somehow link in with data in the .ase file and could be the answer to how we get transparency into our Muvizu models. I'll do some digging!

UKBERTY - this could be what you need for those palm trees!

found this on an Unreal site


Diffuse
The Diffuse channel handles the base color of the of the material. Basically when light hits the materials surface it gets reflected and the diffuse channel has the information which color of the incomming light will be reflected, resulting in the material appearing to have this color. Accordingly for this channel to have any visible effect on the material there has to be light illuminating the material.

Emissive
The Emissive channel simulates the material emitting light. This means that whatever color or texture you put in here will appear to be illuminated or even glowing. For this channel the material can be unlit and still have an effect. The channel also supports input of color values greater than between 0 and 1. Every input value greater than 1 will result in a more intensive glow of the material.

Specular
The Specular channel simulates highlights on the material as a result of reflected light, thus handling the shinyness of the material. Obviously to have highlights the material needs to be lit.

SpecularPower
The SpecularPower channel controls the appearance of the highlights on the materials surface. It accepts only 1 channel as input. Lower values lead to softer highlights, higher values lead to concentrated highlights.

Opacity
The opacity channel handles the transparency of the material. It only accepts one channel as input, where white represents fully opaque, grey values semi-transparent and black fully transparent areas on the material. For the opacity channel to be used the BlendMode of the material needs to be set to BLEND_Translucent (/BLEND_Modulated?/BLEND_ADDITIVE?).
Note: In translucent blend mode all lighting on the material will be discarded. Since there is no light on the material in this mode the diffuse channel will always result in complete black and specularity channel is useless in this mode. The color of the material thus goes into the Emissive channel. Specularity effects can still be faked with approriate material setups via Emissive and Opacity channel. In addition consider setting the materials LightingModel to MLM_Unlit, as this is processed faster and results in the same in this case.

OpacityMask
The OpacityMask channel accepts a mask as input. This means it will accept values of either complete black or complete white. Otherwise it works just as the Opacity channel and can be used to setup transparency wherever no semi-transparent areas are needed on the material. For this channel to be used the material's BlendMode needs to be set to BLEND_Masked.
Note: In BLEND_Masked BlendMode the lighting information on the material is kept, so try to use this rather than BLEND_Translucent wherever possible.

Distortion
The Distortion channel simulates refraction of light by the material. It accepts either a normal map (3 channels/RGB) or an alpha/bump map (1 channel/Greyscale) as input.

TransmissionMask
The TransmissionMask simulates an effect known as Subsurfacescattering (SSS). It controls where light can seep through the material, pick up a color and leave the material on the other side. Good examples of this in the real world would be shining a bright light through your hand or a piece of paper. This channel accepts 1 channel where in white areas this effect gets applied, in grey areas it gets partly applied and in black areas does not get applied.

TransmissionColor
During the process of light seeping through a material as described for TransmissionMask channel it picks up the color of the material it seeps through. This channel controls of which color the light will be when it leaves the material.

Normal
The Normal channel simulates the surface structure of the material and can be used to give the material more depth and detail. It accepts either a normal map (3 channel/RGB) or an alpha/bump map (1 channel/Greyscale) as input.

CustomLighting
The CustomLighting channel can be used to setup an individual lighting model for the material when something different than Phong shading is needed. For this to be used the material's LightingModel needs to be set to MLM_Custom.
edited by toonarama on 20/12/2011
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20/12/2011 11:16:00

JamieMuvizu staff
Jamie
(Account inactive)
Posts: 609 		Dylly wrote:
Can anyone tell me what this bit of Muvizu is for and how to use it? I'm sure I'm missing something useful here!


In brief, this is a bit broken. It should be fixed soon though but let me try to briefly explain them

1. Opacity - this can be transparent from 0 to 100%
2. Opacity mask - easiest way to explain this that it should give a solid or transparent area based on a thresh hold. This is different from the Opacity which gives a graded opacity, the opacity mask gives solid (100% opaque) or transparent (0% opaque).
3. Emissive - it'll glow in the dark.

The other options are all combinations of the above. The way to use them us to create an alpha channel in your texture, which is then mapped to one of these options. This needs to be a TARGA file to support the alpha channel.

Hope this helps, as a brief explanation.

--
Direct, don't animate!
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Home ? Importing Assets ? Import Question... what's this bit of it for?

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