From the course: Maya 2022 Essential Training

Opacity and refraction in Arnold - Maya Tutorial

From the course: Maya 2022 Essential Training

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Opacity and refraction in Arnold

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[Instructor] Now, let's take a look at how to do classy surfaces in Arnold. Now these are surfaces that are somewhat opaque and also have things such as refraction. So here I have a simple scene and if I render this in Arnold you can see that this front material is an Arnold material. If I select this and go into the attribute editor you'll see I have an AI standard surface on this. Now the surface has obviously color specularity and if we want to start controlling things such as refraction, we have to use what's called transmission. So if I turn this all the way up, notice what happens. This particular surface starts to refract but we're not seeing through this. This isn't really an opaque surface. It's just a refractive surface. In fact, if I go over to my index of refraction here in the specular tab, turn it down to say 1.25 and you'll see the refraction kind of goes off. If I turn it to one, the object basically disappears. And that's because all this is showing is that refractivity. So I'm going to put this back up to 1.5 and scroll down. Now, the way that we get this opacity is by going all the way down to the geometry rollout. And we have an opacity control here. If I dial this down notice how the surface becomes semi opaque. So let me go ahead and click off of this so we can see it. So now you can start to see the object behind it. And so we can control that opacity and mix it with the transmission and refractivity to get the surface that we want. So the combination of these three index of refraction transmission and opacity are what control the way that the surface looks. Now transmission controls how light passes through the surface and then index of refraction controls the refractivity and then opacity determines how much of the surface you see through. So keep those in mind as you develop surfaces that require opacity.

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