SP: Adding Opacity Maps

Alright then, your model has some sort of glass or transparency and you can't seem to find how to get that effect. It's easier than you think.

I'm using a quick model of a steam gauge I made because it has a lot of things I can use for tutorials. The dial, of course, is encased in glass, so I need an opacity map.

I've broken this model up into four materials to make life easier. In this part, we're only interested in the "Glass" material which we're going to make now. The first thing we need to do is create a new shader instance, and we do this in the Texture Set List as below;

Create a new instance from the drop-down menu and you're good to go. The new shader will probably be set to PBR metal-rough as below(or whatever you have your default set to), which we don't want for this shader.

We can change this very easily by clicking on the shader name and selecting a new one, in our case we will want to select "Lens-Studio" as below;

Give the "Main shader (Copy)" a double click and rename it to something sensible like "Glass" or "Transparent". Once you close this window your new shader has been set to be used on your transparent part of your mesh. If there is more than one part of your mesh that requires opacity you can simply select the new shader for those parts as well from the dropdown menu in the Texture set list.

The last step is to bake our maps, we want to add opacity to our dial front here so...

Before we bake we should click that little "+" icon here and select Opacity from the menu. You can now carry on with your baking as usual and opacity will be available to you in your layers list. Please note, Opacity is set to 1 as default so when you add a fill layer, texture, material, etc, you will need to set the opacity level to your liking.

Hopefully, that was all straightforward and easy to understand. Now you can add opacity maps to your textures with a few easy steps.

Thanks for reading, and if you feel up to it, you could always share on social media via the buttons below.

Back to Substance Painter main page.