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How to make a (spot) light work with a plane and material in alpha blend

jgarnold

jgarnold

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australia
I have created a scenery model using a plane and a satellite image as it's material and added a 'spot' light. When I build and place the scenery object and change the 'time' to night time the model is not illuminated. I have determined that the problem is caused by the fact that I have the blend mode set to alpha blend (instead of opaque). I did this because the plane is square shaped and the image texture is multisided and I don't want to 'see' the area outside the image texture needs to be invisible (see image below).
How can I set this up so that either it is lit at night?

helipad_transparencies.jpg
 
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Thanks
Never used the Mask modifier before so looked up a tutorial in youtube and got completely confused. All they seemed to use was vertex groups and there are only 4 vertices in my model.
My blender file is too large too attach but can be downloaded at https://mega.nz/file/3ipV0DDA#QsBMqImKzPtadapXhv2OAuxIKMjCwyr_KL7ZbIVzGH8

I then wondered could I create a 8 sided 'plane' by adding mesh circle (with 9 vertices) , apply my texture image as the material and then in edit mode drag each vertice to each 'corner' of the image but could not work out how to do that either eg add mesh circle selecting 9 vertices. Fill, apply a color material worked but using a texture image instead didn't want to work.
 
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Hi John. I split the spotlight to a separate collection, and compiled both (making 2 gltf's). Place the helipad as projected mesh where you need it. Then place the spot as scenery wherever you need that. (2 separate gltf objects). You can't use a spotlight in projected mesh.


Untitled.png
 
Thanks Dick.

I am not placing the 'helipad' as a projected mesh and place it as a scenery object (as well as a terraform polygon to flatten the almost flat terrain) as I was having problems with 'jagged edges' when placed as a projected mesh. Any way I will try your suggestion.

Another method suggested elsewhere would be to use the knife tool in Blender to remove the parts which have been set to transparent and then I won't need to set the blend mode to alpha blend.
Either method hopefully will solve my problem but your method seems the easiest.

Thanks again.
 
Thanks Dick. That is great and something for me to put in my 'help document' for the future if a similar problem occurs.
 
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