Hey Everyone.

First post, but I hope to be active as there's plenty to learn about Maya.

Anyway, I am making an atmosphere texture for a planet (Maya 09, and rendering in Mental Ray) and I was wondering if there was a way to use an alpha channel texture to create the clouds, thereby making them opaque, semi transparent, and fully transparent depending on the thickness of the atmospheric conditions. I know I can do it with particles, and I know how to create an alpha channel texture for a solid object or a smooth gradation, but not one that's opaque or transparent depending on the texture it's referencing. I guess theoretically you could layer multiple layers with alphas applied to get this effect, but I was wondering if there was an easier way that I haven't been able to find as of yet.

Thanks in advance for any help.

welcome to the forums!

you can hook up a greyscale texture to the object's material's transparency slot in the attribute editor

black means it's opaque and white means it's transparent and grey is in between

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that's a "Ch" pronounced as a "K"

Computer skills I should have:
Objective C, C#, Java, MEL. Python, C++, XML, JavaScript, XSLT, HTML, SQL, CSS, FXScript, Clips, SOAR, ActionScript, OpenGL, DirectX
Maya, XSI, Photoshop, AfterEffects, Motion, Illustrator, Flash, Swift3D

Thank you for the reply Chirone.

That was the first thing that I tried, and it didn't work. I thought it would make sense for that to be the way to do it, and I had some vague recollection of doing that in the past, but i don't understand why it wasn't working for me.

I'm wondering if it had something to do with some other settings and attributes I had connected to the poly surface.