Transparency Map
 

Hello -

I am trying to make a transparency map. I have finished my colour map (below) and the problem is that I don't know how to select just the beard area so that I can fill it white. Not the area on his face - that hairy thing in the middle. Obviously I am a bit crap with photoshop. Help!
:beer:

Hi arran,

uncheck all the layers you don't need to display the beard. Then you go to SELECT/COLOUR RANGE, a little window pops up. Set the button at the bottom to SELECTION. Now take the eyedropper and click on the beard area. In your preview window you should now see white what will be you selection. You can tweak it by changing the fuzziness and you can take the PLUSeyedropper and add to your selection if needed. Obviously the minus substracts. Now hit ok and hopefully your beard is selected.
If you still couldn't get it quite right and some parts are missing. I would while the beard is selected go to LAYER/NEW/LAYER VIA CUT or apple+J. That cuts your selection and puts it into a new layer, so you can give the rest of your beard a finetune, without affecting the bit you already have.

good luck:beer:

I forgot, instead of unchecking layers you could take a polygonal lasso and draw around the areas you want to affect. Then apply colour range, and it will only work inside the lasso.:beer:

My, that looks familiar. ;)

If your beard is on its own layer (and it's good practice to do so) you can ctrl click it's layer to select it.

Thanks mtmckinley and farbtopf! That's made it a lot easier. cheers!
:beer:

you're welcome
;)

Hello again,

OK - I am still having problems...(surprised?)

So, I have made my colour map and the transparency map. I saved the colour as a 24 bit targa and the transparency as a 32 bit targa. I then went into maya, applied a blinn to my model and attached the colour map to the colour attribute and the transparency to the transparency attribute... But when I render my scene, this is what I get. What am I doing wrong??

At some point last night I think I did it correctly, but of course I don't know what I did differently. I could only see the effect of the transparency when I rendered and not in the perspective window (which I assume is right), but even so I could still see the transparent planes slightly, especially on the eyebrow planes which are folded.

Here is a view of my hypershade in case this helps. Thanks!:beer:

ok. I think I figured it out. I saved the transparency as a 24 bit targa - not sure why, I thought it had to be 32 - anyway, here's my crappy looking silenus.:shakehead I can still see the transparent planes around the beard, eyebrows and teeth, but I guess that's something to do with the lights? or something else?

I would think that perhaps you don't have your blacks all the way to the absolute black value so it has a tad bit of gray making it slightly visible.

One thing you could do is make sure the background color beneath your beard is a similar color as the beard itself, so you can avoid some dark outlines and stuff.

Looks like you could also stand to soften your edges. :) nice job!

Hello Mike,

Thanks for all of your help. It's much appreciated. I checked the black and I think that it is absolute black, but I'll check again to be certain. Not sure what you meant about the background colour - the colour in photoshop right?

Believe it or not, I haven't used soften edges yet, so I will give it a shot.

Thanks again!:beer: