Alpha Toon

[JimmyC]

Is there any way that textures with competely transparent areas in an alpha channel can be used with cel/toon shaders? Every method I have tried just makes the tranparent area white.

[NightPhantom]

can't you just save that alpha channel as a picture and then apply that picture to the transparency input of the shader? (directly to the shader, instead of going to the texture first)

[JimmyC]

Originally posted by NightPhantom
can't you just save that alpha channel as a picture and then apply that picture to the transparency input of the shader? (directly to the shader, instead of going to the texture first)

Yeah i thought of that, but the textures are also animated, so it would take a while to make animated versions of the transparecy input too (can you even do that?)

[NightPhantom]

animated as in it changes position? with like a 2DPlacement node? Because in that case all what you have to do is conect the node governing the position of the file node that you are using as a texture to the file node with the transparency?

Ummm, I'm a little confused by what I just said... let me try again:
You have a file Texture.tif with an alpha channel. Open the file in photoshop and save two new files, one is the same image but with no alpha called TextureOnly.tif, and the other also doesn't have an alpha, but the image is what the alpha of the original file was, TextureTransparency.tif.
Then Create a file node fileTextureOnly and another fileTextureTransparency. Then asign a 2dPlacement node to fileTextureOnly and move it around in what ever way you wanted to animate it. Then, without deleting the conections between 2dPlacement and fileTextureOnly, asign 2dPlacement to fileTextureTransparency. That way all the movements of the texture will also happen for the transparency (I hope :p).

Now, maybe you are animating it in a different way :-/ but I think that's the only way that I know how to do it.

[JimmyC]

I mean animated as in the texture is an image sequence.

[NightPhantom]

how did you entered the entire sequence?

[JimmyC]

Originally posted by NightPhantom
how did you entered the entire sequence?

I just keyed the frame extension value.

[NightPhantom]

i c, ummm... well, if you had the transparency files already then all you would have to do is repeat that process, the problem is to get all of those transparencies. I mean, you need some kind of program that will separate the alphas for each image and name the files in sequence all automatically. Unfortunately I know of no such program :-/ maybe someone else here knows of something like that.

[JimmyC]

Originally posted by NightPhantom
i c, ummm... well, if you had the transparency files already then all you would have to do is repeat that process, the problem is to get all of those transparencies. I mean, you need some kind of program that will separate the alphas for each image and name the files in sequence all automatically. Unfortunately I know of no such program :-/ maybe someone else here knows of something like that.

I can do it in after effects, i was just hoping there was a less time/disk space consuming method.