[dmatarch]

Hi,

The custom alpha feature is great and one of the reasons I'm using Maxwell more now. I've noticed though that if I include a custom alpha to an object in a scene (say a column) and then include another custom alpha higher up the hierarchy (say to the whole building) the whole building alpha doesn't contain the column. It would be great to include any object combination to add to different alphas but it seems currently if they are in two groups they get separated rather than duplicated. Let me know if I'm missing something here.

Also it would add some nice flexibility to be able to export the opaque and non-opaque alpha for an object at the same time. I've tried adding two custom alphas with the same name in the output settings with ticked to opaque but it doesn't seem to export both.

Is there a way of getting the back-face material into a custom alpha also? I've been setting up some trees and using 2-sided leaves to add variety. The backface material doesn't appear to render with its own material ID and the whole leaf is treated as one. It would be great to be able to select both sides of the leaf in post to tweak as necessary.

[JDHill]

Regarding the first question, if I understand the scenario correctly (if not, please send to jeremy at nextlimit dotcom, a small Cinema file demonstrating it) the reason is that assigning the child object to a specific channel stops it trying to inherit the channel of its parent. The solution is to tell the plugin what you want, by explicitly including the child in more than just its own channel -- here, the top-level building's custom alpha channel, and also the custom alpha for the child. For each line found in the Object Properties tag's Custom Alpha text box, the plugin will check if there exists a named custom alpha channel, and if so, will perform the assignment.

It is similar with the second question: create two custom alpha channels, named e.g. "obj-opaque" and "obj-transp", the first with Opaque enabled, and then put those two names on two lines in the object's Object Properties > Custom Alpha Channels box.

Regarding the last question, this would be something outside the plugin's realm, and I'm not sure whether it would be regarded as a bug, or a limitation. You may want to ask about it in the main Maxwell Render forum.

[dmatarch]

Thank you. I've had a chance to test this out now and including the child in more than its own channel solves this. I'd mistakenly thought the Cinema hierarchy had an influence on the tags. The future ability to assign an individual material to a custom alpha that I've seen will give even more flexibility also.