[QUESTION] How to properly add textures with alpha (png) to geometry?

[neblina]

Hello everyone! I've been following some tutorials and stumbled upon some introduction to UV Mapping inside Houdini, even utilising parameters from the geometry itself for live-updating later when tweaking it, which is awesome!

Sadly I only got it working when applying a normal jpeg as texture. It doesn't seem to work at all with a png as input. 

Attached is the setup that worked well with a normal jpeg texture for a procedural road I'm working on. I followed the tutorial and apparently one should convert it to NURBS before UV mapping. For me that didn't work; choosing Mesh instead worked fine. I tried that same setup only swapping the files, in this case a those wire fences as png, but nothing is shown in my viewport, although no errors come up.

The UV Mapping part is actually working fine (I guess). Apparently I just can't setup the material (or texture) correctly. Am I missing something, or should I approach it differently?

Thanks in advance!

Edited October 25, 2017 by neblina

[neblina]

Okay, so I figured it out, kind of.

It took me forever to debug this, since it didn't make sense at all. Finally, since the texture was downloaded from the internet it had a random file name, and it's first character was a dollar sign ($), this was somehow interfering. I renamed and it worked fine, the .png texture shows as expected in the viewport.

I'm not aiming for rendering or anything, but I was curious to see how it looked if I tried. So bam, another issue. Apparently the alpha channel gets blacked out. and does not show through. See attached picture with side by side comparison from viewport and mantra rendering. I apologise if this is trivial, I'm just starting out with Houdini and couldn't find anything related to this.

Anyone knows what I should do differently to fix this? Thanks in advance!