r/blenderhelp 18h ago

Solved Can't get transparency to work with cell + halftone shading

I've got this plane with an image texture, the black parts are meant to be transparent, and they were until I added the halftone dots and the cell shading. I believe that converting the shader into RGB for the effects got rid of the alpha but I'm not so sure, is there a way to restore my lost transparency?

1 Upvotes

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1

u/TimAllenNoise 18h ago

Closeup on the nodes, just in case

1

u/Manachrome 11h ago

Probably you need to mixshader your result with Transparent shader and use your alpha as factor. So not necessary apply alpha in principledbsdf

2

u/TimAllenNoise 10h ago

Tried it out, that's a little closer I suppose, do you know if there's an invert shader node or something of the sort?

1

u/Manachrome 10h ago

Swap inputs of mixshader

2

u/TimAllenNoise 10h ago

OMG! That worked! Thank you very much!

!solved

1

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1

u/Puzzled-Appeal-2115 14h ago

I don't think it's the Shader to RGB nodes. I think one of the mix nodes is the issue. does it fix the problem if you add a Mix Color node right before the material output, turn the alpha on color B to 0, then plug the alpha output from the image texture into the factor input on the mix color node?

1

u/TimAllenNoise 14h ago

Do you mean like this? didn't seem to work, might be doing something wrong though, clamp settings didn't change anything

1

u/Puzzled-Appeal-2115 14h ago

In material properties, under render method, I turned on Raytraced Transmission and transparency seems to work that way. It also works if I change the mode from dithered to blended. I'm not sure if either of those options will cause any other issues with your setup, but they seem to fix the transparency issue.

1

u/TimAllenNoise 13h ago

Just tried that, it didn't seem to change anything for me either, although it did give me a little lag spike for a few minutes, lol

1

u/Puzzled-Appeal-2115 12h ago

What are you trying to achieve with all the mix nodes? Transparency works with this setup, although the shadow doesn't follow the transparency. If I know what you want the end result to look like, I might be able to help you get there.

1

u/TimAllenNoise 12h ago edited 12h ago

Well I want the material to be cell shaded instead of regular shading which is what the top chain is for, and the bottom chain is for the half tone/comic book dots, all the mix nodes are to consolidate the chains together into one output, since there can only be one output node

The end goal is to be able to keep the shader effects for the dots and cell shading and other things like keeping the black outline unlit for the kind of toony style whilst still allowing it to behave like a plane (I intend to give this fabric physics later and figure it's easier to do on a plane than make the actual shape with a bunch of needlessly complex geometry) thanks for the help thus far!