material layer transparency / texture multiplier

[andreas]

... i am a little confused here, as far as i understood, by the transparency color you can control the influence of the specific layer (the darker the color, the less the influence, am i right?
In which way does the multiplier affect a texture? is this similar? What does it do if you raise the multiplier to something above 1?

thank you for your answer

Andy

[joe_b]

Re: material layer transparency / texture multiplier

... i am a little confused here, as far as i understood, by the transparency color you can control the influence of the specific layer (the darker the color, the less the influence, am i right?

The transparency actually controls how much it lets light go through a layer. If the transparency is black then no light makes it through the layer, thus any layers beneath it are cutoff and will not be visible.

In which way does the multiplier affect a texture? is this similar? What does it do if you raise the multiplier to something above 1?

For most textures other than emitters / bump the texture multiplier acts as a mix ratio between the color and the texture for a given thing. For instance, if you are selecting a diffuse texture and you set its multiplier to 0.5 you are blending evenly between the diffuse color and the diffuse texture. A mulitplier of 0.0 would yield only the diffuse color, and a multiplier of 1.0 will yield nothing but the texture.

I need to change the UI so that the multiplier ranges / increment changes based on the situation at hand, for a bump map a -20.0 multiplier may make sense, for an emitter a multiplier of 100.0 might make sense, whereas anything outside the range of 0.0 - 1.0 really doesn't make sense for most other textures.

I hope this clears it up a bit, it is still a work in progress after all