Matte Surface with an overlay

[isoparmesan]

I'm trying to figure out a way to take the alpha channel from a texture file, and pass it as a mask to something like the use background shader, or a vray material wrapper with "matte surface" enabled.

Is there a way for the material wrapper matte surface attribute to still take affect if it's being used as the base material of a vray blend material? That way I could just pass a surface shader with the texture file (image sequence actually) into one of the coat channels.

Is there a way to which part of a surface gets matted with the material wrapper by way of a texture or alpha channel? Currently it seems like either the entire surface is used as a matte, or none of it.

[Morbid Angel]

you can use switch material where black is 0 (your base mtl) and white is 1 your matter/wrapper mtl you can plug your texture as a material switch value, that should work.

[isoparmesan]

This is exactly what I want. Thanks so much!

[isoparmesan]

So, I'm noticing that the switch material doesn't seem to blend between the different materials at all. Is this normal, or am I doing something wrong?

For example: If I have a Material wrapper functioning as a matte in slot 0, and a surface shader in slot 1, and the "switch" parameter is set to .999, it will completely show the matte material. If I plug in a greyscale texture into the switch parameter, and there is a grey value (somewhere between 0.0 and 1.0), it will default to the matte, until the value hits 1.0.

If the switch material doesn't blend, then I will probably need a different solution.

[yolov]

The Switch material will not blend materials at all. It will round up the float values for the switch to use a specific material from the list. For example, it will use material 0 for switch values between 0 and 0.999. The reason for this is that you can feed it a float texture and that's why we haven't limited it to using integers. To blend materials, you would need the blend material.