Black to Transparency

[Rez007]

Hello,

I am hoping someone can help me here. Lets say I have a glass orb that has a glowing object inside of it. Well I set this up in its own environment with the glass using an architectural material with the reflectivity at 100percent. When it renders out the black comes along with the image becuase it is being reflected in the glass orb. What would be the best way to get rid of that black? I am trying to use the FXTree to just change the black color and fade it out to a transparency but I am unsure of what node is best to use. Also, the final orb image has to be sent out alone and not compositied on top of any image as it will layover others iamges down the road. Any help would be much appreciated. Thanks.

[Mathaeus]

Hi,

don't know is it the solution, but anyway:

Standard XSI shaders, for example 'Reflection', are able to 'reflect' alpha channel too. So, if reflected object have something like 'Color Share' node with appropriate alpha value, or your environment image have alpha (*.hdr don't have a 'proper' alpha, but *.exr have ) - you'll get alpha in reflection. Mentioned Color Share' can be plugged only into reflection port of Ray Type shader, if you want to isolate effect.

Another way may be to use XSI ambient occlusion in reflective mode, with zero spread, as a input for 'weight', for Mix 2Colors - one color with reflective shader, another with Color Share with black color and zero alpha.

[Rez007]

Thanks for the reply. I really appreciate it. However, I am having a little trouble following what you are mentioning - I am not that great with shader setups so I might be misunderstanding something.

Currently I am using the Arch shader for the glass orb, and my current environment is the native black (empty space) with just a couple of constant grids setup for reflections. One thing I tried is to seperate the passes into diffuse, ambient, reflection, refraction ,etc. and reconstruct it that way - which did not work that well either. However, I did notice that the black I think is actually sitting in the refraction channel, as the reflection does show an alpha like you mentioned in your post. I actually modeled my orb with with an otter shell and inner shell to make it more correct than using "thin wall" mode in the arch shader. If this helps as more information, I would greatly like to know what I need to do from this point if you have any ideas.

Thanks in advance.