We need an effect (whose sequence I'm currently laying out) that makes the characters gradually disappear from the ground up. Is there a material that can do this? Like a transparency map on the whole model....
Anyone any ideas?
Thanks.

A moving material effector (affector?) wont' do that?

A what-not-now? Whip one up there and I'll tell you if it works or not.

search for "Material Effects Object" in Help. It has a bare bones discussion and example.

It's an object that transfers its properties to other objects.

Just ask John. I'm fairly certain he will have something that does just this.

We probably want the transparency to use inverted edge falloff so that the normals pointing toward you are fully transparent, and the normals pointing out to the sides are less transparent, (like a ghost effect).

It would be neat to come up with some sort of "Predator"-style refraction effect. On the other hand, the audience may start asking "if I can see them, why can't they see each other?"

Have we considered "Topper" invisibility where they really do disappear and we just see their foot steps and other effects on the things around them?

Is this what your looking for?

It's a gradient material with one of the attributes transparent, the other not set. The start position and the translation of the material are animated in the chor.

The drawback is it needs to be applied to the models.

the gradient way is probably the best since material effectors effect all the models it touches

That's the idea Mark. Did you do it like this?

http://www.hash.com/daily_dose/feature_focus/burn/

I think that illustrates the way John said which sounds the easiest. So, I'll test that out tomorrow. Cheers.

Robert: There's not alot of things to bump into in the set and putting footprints in now would look out of place! I think the audience will grasp that the effect is meant just for them.

No, I didn't use a material effector, and I just used a basic gradient material. I animated the material shortcut in the chor.

If it works, a Material Effector would be the way to go. That way it wouldn't have to be put on the model, and the characters can walk into it!

Does anyone know if this information is out of date on that tutorial:



I can't find a raytrace tab or "Override Base Attribute" and "Glowing" boxes.

OK, I've made an effector, put it in a model and dragged it into the chor. It makes the characters invisible! Great. The problem now is it also makes the landscape invisible. Is there a way to make models "immune" to the effector?

After some experimenting, I think now it's best to build the effector into the character models and control it's strength with a pose. But there are problems with effectors...notably hair doesn't become transparent/insides don't become transparent/ground becomes transparent. But I think I'll go with this for now (and hope the problems get ironed out).

As of now, you can't use a material effector, but if a new feature was added to allow you to drag and drop the effector onto a model and it would only effect that model, then it can be used (ala light lists).

Oh well. The poses are in the characters now anyway. We'll sort it out later.

I totally agree. My quick test: Click to view attachment

My experiments with material effectors seems to show an enormous render hit. The above example is only a single pass and I had to turn off ray traced lighting otherwise the render times went through the roof.

If you could drop a material effector onto a group, so that it only affected that group, and became constrained to that group, you could have limbs fading in and out at different rates. Material Effectors currently only exist in a choreography though. It seems to me that it would speed up the computations a bit by excluding everything in the scene except the groups associated with the material effector.
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Edit
Sorry, Mark. I didn't see your other solution using a gradient material. The material effector does seem like the simplest method if it could be given a "target list" in which you could select just the objects that would be affected by the material from a drop down list of alll the objects in the choreography.

What about toon render with lines only... I don't know anything about toon render, but is it possible to do the fading from normal render to toon with lines only? If not, it is worth it just to chime in here. Xray and micro materials don't have any effect on some of the parts of characters with materials on them. This is a very interesting thing to investigate. I don't want to sidetrack the wonderful ideas everyone has come up with, but this brings me back to the old cell animations I remember from childhood, when invisable charcters would just become monochrome outlines when they turn invisable.

That's a great idea.

Do you think the toon render characters will have to be composited into the scene? Sounds trickey... I've tried to render a character with toon lines only and the whole scene is rendered with toon lines and the camera's background color. Is there a way to render a character with toon and have the rest of the scene render with normal settings? Is someone out there testing this?

Whatever the effect (invisibile/toon) my guess is it's going to be composited.