Paint Effects Stamp Alpha problem
 

Hi people!

It's my first post here, and I first would like to thank for the help and support provided by this forum.

Here's my problem:

I have two paint effects trees customized (parameters were tweaked) with flow animation and a camera that's animated like a turntable. As it is, there's moments that the big tree is in front of the little tree and vice-versa.
At this moment (picture at the left) the stamps that produce the leaves seems to have an Alpha problem, creating darkened areas where they should be completely transparent.

I'm using Maya 2008 with Maya Software render engine, and all shadows on all strokes are set to none as well as "Cast Shadows" turned off both on the lights and on the strokes.

One additional information: when the little tree ends up growing (flow animation reaches 100%), the camera shows it again in front of the big one, and there's no alpha problem. Maybe the problem is somehow related to the the flow animation before it reaches 100%?

Thanks in advance!

http://i38.photobucket.com/albums/e1...bra01cpia3.jpg

Found a way out!
 

I'm gonna reply myself, since I have found a way out to solve this.

I actually changed the big tree brush type (under attribute editor> Brush Type) from [Mesh] to [Paint].
I had already noticed that there were differences between my two trees specially regarding Anti Aliasing.
I also had to crank up the Stamp Density from 3 (default) to 6.
Now I think it's more clear for me when Paint Effects uses Stamps ([Paint] Brush Type) and when it uses something like geometry ([Mesh] Brush Type) (I don't know if they are actual polygons since they are not converted). But the difference between both methods is very clear when you see the result.

Since both trees are made of Stamps, the artifacts I showed last post are now gone. Maybe there's something that don't work well when using Paint Tree in front of a Mesh Tree, Flow Animation, Maya Software, and stuff...

I also noticed that when using the paint method, the tree shading seems to be slightly different, but I'll deal with it, no problem.

Hope it'll be useful for someone as it was for me :)

http://i38.photobucket.com/albums/e1...2resolvido.jpg

Again, great troubleshooting there Mario!
You are QUICKLY racking-up the sticky posts to help everyone out with the details of rendering PaintFX in Maya:)

Please Keep it up!

Thanks again!

Izzy

Hi there Izzy!

Another sticky one? That's great!
When I was dealing with it, i kind of thought: "Am I stupid?... Or this is indeed way too complicated to work right?" LOL... just kidding.
Now I see that it was not quite obvious for me, but it works great when we get used to this wonderful tool.

By the way, I learned a lot searching and reading about Paint Effects around this forum.

Thanks again and cheers!

Mario