Ghostly Apparitions

pwiecek

If you've tried to make your own ghostly characters by making a 3d model transparent, but the internal structure and back of the mesh got in the way, here's an idea.

A few years ago there were several products that allowed you to put background characters in a scene cheaply (in terms of resources). They're gone now but you can easily make your own. In fact, do it yourself is better because you get exactly what you want.

Pose and render your character against an empty background,
Take the render into a 2d program and extract an alpha channel
create a 2d square prop in your scene and apply the render as diffuse & alpha as trans.
At this point you can duplicate what those old products did

In order to get the ghosts, simply fill the white part of the alpha image with grey. The darker the grey, the more transparent the image.
You can even vary the grey to make some parts more visible. A smooth gradient would make the legs fade off into nothing.

SickleYield

That works, too, but Fuseling and I have a product out soon that also helps create ghosts (including gradient transmaps to hide the head, arms and/or legs, or to show just these areas).

Renpatsu

For hiding internal parts some shaders provide a "Fantom" switch and some shaders are even specialised for providing additional effects like pwGhost or pwEffect. pwGhost is actually part of the "Value Category" at the moment, in case you are a PC member.

pwiecek

SickleYield said:

That works, too, but Fuseling and I have a product out soon that also helps create ghosts (including gradient transmaps to hide the head, arms and/or legs, or to show just these areas).

soon
soooooon
soo-ooo-ooon

Unfortunately, that word doesn't have the best of reputations here.