Hello all,

I am working on a project that has a ghost in it. I have to be missing something, because I can't seem to figure out a way to make a character partially transparent. If i go the route of choosing each material and making it partially transparent, then you see the things (arms, legs, etc.) that are under those materials, and it looks like a mess. So far, the only way I have been able to make it work was to render out the ghost character and bring it in as a billboard or a something like that, and adjust the transparency accordingly. Of course, the obvious problem is that if I want to change perspective or something like that, then I have to re-render the ghost as well. 

Am I missing something simple, that will allow me to make the entire character partially transparent AS A SINGLE UNIT? 

Thanks for your help.

i was just working on a quick tip video for ghosts....
if you have cc3, you can remesh to lower poly and have 1 texture
then you can use a animated noise map in the opacity channel
or a static one and animate the uvs or scale.(less resources)
add a glow map, turn on gi, set shadows to off and self illumination to 100
you may get hard edges doing it like this due to uv boundries
so i add a few popcorn fxs with mesh samplers
usually one with distortion to help the hard edges

with a little tinkering they can look pretty cool
and really look cool clipping through a wall

edit: sample video added





.

Select avatar, go to modify, material, select all textures (shift select them all) load in opacity map (I used the medium gray).  It will make all of them the same opacity, linked to the same material (so you can adjust one and it will adjust all, easy-peasy).

I did this in CC3 but you can do it in iClone as well (I think)




Although if you are dead set on not having any skin show you can always use hide mesh in the clothing options of conform (I guess it depends on what your definition of a ghost is.  If you watch a lot of the ghosts in shows they often do show the underlying outfits and such.  But otherwise you could do a double pass in post -- that's how they do it in the movies).

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Mike "ex-genius" Kelley

My "low-tech" way to do a ghost is to render the scene twice, once without the ghost avatar and another render with only the ghost avatar as a .png sequence then in my NLE I composite the two scenes together fading the ghost in and out at will...



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Hi folks,

Thanks for your answers. You answered the question that I had, and it seems that the solutions that I have tried are pretty much the best way to go. Shucks. I was hoping that there was something that I had missed that was just completely obvious... but no. Anyway, I appreciate all of you who took time to share your experience and expertise with me.

Terry

Hey Terry Ali g the same lines as what KT suggested, I select all of the materials in the edit window and there is a slider for opacity. Lower it and there ya go. Super easy. If you want a more uniform color for the ghost you can always select a color while all material are selected so you end up with one uniform color. I did this for a short film where I needed a ghost monkey, took all of a minute to do. Super EZ.


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I did a "spirit being" and I used the same method Mark suggested.
- Render the scene twice, once with the "ghost" (appearing normally) and once without the ghost
- Overlay the two scenes in your video editing s/w, and adjust the transparency of the "ghost" layer (as the top layer)

Good luck, and have fun.

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