Planet Lava Flare Has Visible Transparent Square Using Fog Camera

luci45

I am having a problem with Planet Lava turning off the little rectangles with the flare lights on them. When using the fog cameras, the square planes, which are supposed to be transparent, aren't quite transparent and don't look very good. It doesn't matter how far away or dark I make the fog.

To get around this I thought I could turn off the opacity in the surface editor of all the flares and other little ambient lights that are on square planes, then render them separately with no lights and then composite them in Photoshop. This works for the sparks, because I can turn them off. But turning off opacity in surface editor doesn't help with the flares and little lights.

Has anyone else had this problem and found a fix for it?

SpottedKitty

Try checking some of the other parameters on those materials, e.g. Ambient and Specularity. These can still let something show in the final render even after you've dialled Opacity all the way down — I think this is how some glass effects are done.

luci45

SpottedKitty said:

Try checking some of the other parameters on those materials, e.g. Ambient and Specularity. These can still let something show in the final render even after you've dialled Opacity all the way down — I think this is how some glass effects are done.

Thanks. I turned them all down to zero and it didn't help. Maybe something needs to be the same color as the fog, since the fog camera is causing it. Will try that next.

mjc1016

Can you post a screenshot of the surface settings for one of the flares?

Also, remove the transparency map and then turn opacity to zero.

luci45

mjc1016 said:

Can you post a screenshot of the surface settings for one of the flares?

Also, remove the transparency map and then turn opacity to zero.

This is strange. Today the flares are rendering OK, without the transparent square showing. The only thing I did different is having progressive rendering turned off. I was having problems with rendering Uber Area Lights a few months ago and reported it as a bug. The tech support person told me to turn off progressive rendering and try - that worked. So I'll assume it's just a glitch with the render engine and progressive rendering on my computer.

Thanks for the reply. If it starts up again I will be back and post a screenshot of the surface settings, and also try removing the transparency map with opacity at zero.