Go to the add menu(Shift+A) in the shader editor, find shader and choose a Transparent BSDF.Drag and drop your image into the shader editor on the left side of the Principled BSDF node.Make sure that you have the correct object and material selected.These are the steps we follow to use an image with alpha transparency in Cycles.
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How to set up a material for transparency in Blender But we are getting ahead of ourselves here. We could use any of the other channels in an image and tell Blender that we, for instance want to use the Red channel as alpha. All an alpha channel really is, is a gray scale image. For instance, we can use the built-in procedural textures in Blender to generate an alpha channel. There are other file types that also support alpha, but PNG is the file type you are most likely to come across. A JPEG for instance does not support alpha, while PNG files does. The image format we are using also needs to support an alpha channel. If an image has an alpha channel, you will generally know that it does. We also need to make sure that the alpha channel isn't empty, which can be the case with many image files. To use transparency, we therefore need an image with an alpha channel. Alpha is then used to create transparency. But in some image types, such as a PNG file, we may have a fourth channel that we call alpha. If there is a difference between them you can say that in an image, we have red, green and blue channels. They are after all, almost the same thing. The words transparency and alpha are often used interchangeably. What is transparency and its prerequisites? Let’s cover the details on how we achieve this in both Eevee and Cycles as well as some possible caveats and downsides that we may encounter. We mix the two shaders together with a mix shader and use the alpha channel from the image texture node as the factor input. To use an image textures alpha channel in Blender we need to set up a material that combines a shader node like Principled BSDF with a transparency BSDF node. But when I learned about shaders and the node editor, I found the answer. This also works on black backgrounds, just don't use the Invert layer filter.When I first came across a situation when I needed a transparent image in Blender, I didn’t have any idea how to make that happen. There you have it! If you find your finished result isn't fully opaque (solid) in the areas you like it, you can either tweak the curves and do it again (you'll need more white in those areas), or just duplicate the result/layer a few times until it becomes less transparent (example below). Now click back on your original layer to exit the layer mask direct edit and hide all your adjustment layers. Now paste the black and white image you just copied into there. Now ALT+ Click in the layer mask icon to enter direct edit mode.
Create a layer mask on your original layer. Now CTRL+ A to select the entire image and CTRL+ SHIFT+ C to copy the combined greyscale result. You may have to tweak this a few times to get the amounts right. Tweak the Curves until everything you'd like to be solid/opaque is white, and everything you want fully transparent is black. This will give you a good visual reference though to tweak the black/white balance)Īdd an Invert adjustment layer, then a Curves adjustment layer. (Technically you could skip step, as we'll be pasting it into a layer mask which will convert it to greyscale anyway. If you don't have any gradient in your original image, you can just use a Threshold adjustment layer instead, which will result in 100% black or 100% white results. Update: Here are some step by step instructions:Īdd a Saturation/Hue adjustment layer and turn down the Saturation until the image has no color. You'd create a duplicate of the layer, desaturate and invert it, pasting the greyscale result into the original layers layermask. One method is to use the original image/layer as its own layer mask.