THE OPACITY SECTION

Opacity defines what percentage of the channel is going to use the fractal image. The Opacity fractal and spectrum are only enabled when the opacity is set to fractal. (Note: The default setting is 'constant') The other settings are Additive, Subtractive and Multiplicative.

The opacity fractal/spectrum sections work the same as the main fractal/spectrum sections. You can even copy and paste fractal data between them. When opacity is set to additive, the fractal value is multiplied by the percentage next to the opacity control and added to the current channel value. Subtractive does the same but subtracts, and multiplicative multiplies the fractal value by the current channel value.This is a great feature if you dont want the plug-in to completely override your normal LW surface settings.

The following image shows a standard surface:

Now we add fractalizer to the surface with a vein pattern. We don’t want the vein to take over the entire surface. We want it to affect only portions of the surface, so we set up a fractal opacity spectrum that matches the color spectrum. The following image shows the vein pattern applied over the existing surface.

Observe the screenshot below. The area highlighted in orange represents the opacity gradient. White areas are opaque, dark areas are transparent. The Light blue area is the opacity spectrum. Note that this is set up so that it matches up with the color spectrum that makes up the vein pattern. The dark blue section represents the Opacity fractal. It’s settings are set to match up exactly with the color fractal. Having set these two areas properly, we have effectively created a transparency mask for the color channel.

This surface file is located under Newtek/tutorials/fractalizer/surfaces/