CompuServe Messages

>>>I mean, I love A:M and I love working with it, but some things just drive me nutso. Peter, this seems to be the standard relationship with A:M ;=) The transparency troubles you describe are just part of those "quirks" everybody sooner or later runs into… The reason I jumped into the tread was because I have been there (overlapping bright areas) before and with careful adjustments I got rid of them… I use A:M mostly for a high resolution product still shots, including many transparent cosmetic containers with color gels, foil stamps printing and other tricky objects, including whole bitmap background scenes shown through infracted transparent shapes. (I am a commercial artist, with about 80% of my business in packaging design). Because of this kind of work I have spent huge amounts of time playing with the transparency issues… I hear what you are saying about the additive and subtractive color model, and can't really judge if this is the cause of our trouble or not. My experience has been to pay extremely close attention to ambiance when dealing with the transparency… (my guess is that the bug, if there is such is in this area rather than the color model) If your transparent object has the Ambiance value 0, it is possible that the object behind is "too ambient", or "not ambient enough" and in order to compensate the scene has light sources that are too many or too strong … As for the "fog" material, the only thing I've played with was an attempt to create a "glow" around certain object by placing a simple 4 point patch with transparency mapping (specularity was 0, to avoid highlight) — I almost got it working except for the edge that has rendered as totally opaque — it goes back to this dreadful "background color" that shows up when you need it the least… Since the "glow" area is supposed to disappear into the scene, the grayscale bitmap used for mapping starts black out of the frame and gradually gets lighter… Well, the black becomes the "background color" (so handy in cookie mapping!) and instead of being 100% transparent, becomes 100% "nonexistent" so the segment can fully show itself <BG> If for some reason you do not have this problem in the Mac (it certainly is a bug — just appeared to me that it might even be file format specific, let say TGA or PCX — I will have to test it), you might want to try the transparency mapping to create fogs, clouds, glows and so on… Since transparency mapping is not the same as transparency in A:M (it is described as simple color averaging) it shouldn't give you any trouble with the ambiance… — Hey, why don't you try to wrap a tiny (10×10 pixels) gray bitmap on your syringe as transparency mapping and try to render it that way… It looks like crazy idea but it might work. (Unless the "background color creaps in <g>).