Is there such a way to render out your liquid transparent and not black?
In my composition I have a background layer with a couple different terrains and I want my liquid pic sequence to be layered ontop of it so as it flows over the background image it picks up the colors under it.
I've learned how to not select my ground plane object during the rendering and that helps with my overall goal but when I layer my liquid on my image it looks like glossy black tar.
You were trying to render water over a bg image, yes?
The problem with the water material is that it is designed for use in a 3d scene that is surrounded by other elements. It will reflect and more importantly refract the other elements of your scene. When compositing such a material, it is undesirable to have the water have anything but an opaque alpha channel as a glass/water material will not properly refract 2d layers during the compositing stage.
Which of course makes your task a little more tricky.
Something you *may* be able to do is add an environment map to your material ( http://www.sidefx.com/docs/houdini9.5/light/map [sidefx.com] ). The third one there *may* be of use to you. This will get rid of the black color and make it seem that the water is reflecting/refracting an outdoor environment with a blue sky.
You may also wish to have your background image render as a Phantom object, which means that it's colors will be taken into consideration during the render.
Allegro You were trying to render water over a bg image, yes?
Yes. If you wanna cut to the point.
Allegro The problem with the water material is that it is designed for use in a 3d scene that is surrounded by other elements. It will reflect and more importantly refract the other elements of your scene. When compositing such a material, it is undesirable to have the water have anything but an opaque alpha channel as a glass/water material will not properly refract 2d layers during the compositing stage.
I was kind of starting to figure this was how it was working.
Which of course makes your task a little more tricky.
Allegro Something you *may* be able to do is add an environment map to your material ( http://www.sidefx.com/docs/houdini9.5/light/map [sidefx.com] ). The third one there *may* be of use to you. This will get rid of the black color and make it seem that the water is reflecting/refracting an outdoor environment with a blue sky.
Testing this out now. Looks like it may get it close enough for what I'm trying to accomplish.
Allegro You may also wish to have your background image render as a Phantom object, which means that it's colors will be taken into consideration during the render.
This is very interesting to me. I will go off and learn a bit more about it. So this is kinda handled in the comp view etc?
Thanks So much for your reply. I didn't realize that you posted because I forgot to have “Notify Me” Ticked in my original post.
