Hardware render and Alpha
 

OK guys heres the problem.
I have a fountain of water which is hardware rendered and the animation causes some tree leaves to come in front of the water particles. Now I have geometry mask turned on for this , but the problem is that the tree leaf geomerty is masked but it doesnt consider the alpha channel with which the leaves are made of from. So how do you get around this. How do you get the hardware particles to come through the alpha channel?

one way is to apply a black hole shader to it or apply a flat black lambert shader to the plant that way it will cut out the particles. But looking at your pic it shouldn't matter because if you are comping it afterwards just render the plant, fountain and the house separately and then stick the fountain in the middle of the other two.

:ninja:
A

Hi there.
I know what your saying but because the geometry of the leaf is much broader than the leaf colour/texture which you can see, this blocks out the particles completely, but in reality you should see the particles right up to the edge of the leaf colour, ignoring the actual poly shape but respecting the texture/alpha.

ok i see what you're doing. So do what I said and render the tree on a different layer! that way you don't need to worry and you can use the tree's alpha to place it ontop of everything else.

:ninja:
A