Yeah, Subdiv SOP works, but I really don't like the overhead, and I need better displacements. It's not just Michael's file that won't render as subd, my own files don't work either.
By painting transparency did you mean painting by hand in photoshop?

nah, these are tests i made in houdini with the methods spoken about in this thread (fading layers of textures right on the model using vops, custom attributes, paint sop).. all work fine with poly's as subd's…

as for the subd sop, you could just throw it at the bottom of your chain and set the render flag to it and your display flag on whatever other sop you want.

deecue
nah, these are tests i made in houdini with the methods spoken about in this thread (fading layers of textures right on the model using vops, custom attributes, paint sop).. all work fine with poly's as subd's…

Really? I've tried it a few times with new scenes created from scratch and no luck so far. :?
And the Subdivide SOP still needs to be calculated everytime you render, which kind of gets to be a pain in the ass when you're tweaking shaders and test-rendering a lot.

well, i thought to myself maybe it's because you were using procedural textures and my tests were on images, but i just made a quick example and it seemed to work fine with procedural ones as well..

here's the example if it helps at all… let me know if it doesn't like to render for you..

http://studentpages.scad.edu/~dquiru20/paint_transparency.hipnc [studentpages.scad.edu]

hth,
dave

Thanks for putting up your file deecue.
This is weird. When I remove the Lighting Model VOP from my shader it works (though it's not much use without it), otherwise mantra dies after rendering the first bucket. But your scene works regardless of wether it has it or not. The only real difference I can see is that you used infra-red to paint the mask instead of grey-scale.
I'll play around some more, maybe I can find the cause.

Alright, I figured it out. My UV operations were set to vertices instead of points, which I guess is not good when you're dealing with SubD surfaces. Unfortunately I was using UVPelt, which as it turns out, actually splits the geometry along your selection when you set it to points unlike, say, the UVProject SOP. So then tried AttributePromote, but my UVEdits are still a little messed up along the borders because they were expecting verts instead of points, now they need to be redone. Those damn UVPelts were a lot of work. :x
Oh well, at least I know what I need to do now. Thanks again for your help deecue!

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edit: ok, I doubt anyone cares but there is a better way. I just changed the AttributeCreate SOPs from points to vertecies. I do have to redo the Paint SOPs, but that's minor compared to having to redo the UVPelts (which is damn near impossible if you're trying to make them work with points). Disaster averted.

this is possibly the coolest thing i've seen in a 3d app, thanks all.

why is the second attribute create required, since its not referenced by any OP's ?

awesome dajuice.. glad everything worked out alright without a complete redo..

mark2: that second attrib is bad cleanup job on my part, you can disregard it.. i redid an old test i found and the old test had three layers fading in and out of eachother, so it needed a second attrib for the second paint sop i had before.. thought i got rid of everything but must of missed that..

haha no worries dave, thanks for posting it in the first place, makes it so much easier to see whats happening when you can see the .hip.