TRON - Light Cycle Battle - Foolin' Around (Patreon)

I decided to take a break from NSFW work, and take a crack at figuring out the headache that is trying to layer 3 transparent grids on top of each other, while also having the light ribbons coming out of the back of the cycles also be translucent, while having animated normal maps.

I learned from Majora's port of Cadet Oxton that the Refract shader can be used (and really is the only way) to properly layer color on top of other objects, and have it still be see-through. I have since applied this on to my own visors on Nude Tracer, and on Nude Sombra for her Tulum skin. But I used this knowledge to apply it to the Light Cycle Grid. It doesn't work quite 100% right, but it's a sight better than layering $translucency, which is a piece of shit in Source.

The grid layers are a solid Refract material with no refraction and a slight blur, while the actual grid space lines are another UnLitGeneric material on top of them, with $alphatest applied to draw the lines, as having them on the same Refract material makes them basically invisible.

The light ribbons are Refract with an animated normal map. These are the biggest problem. The light ribbons themselves would already be a pain in the ass to properly translate into SFM animation, with the nature of them being curved in TRON:Legacy, and Source's limitations on rigging. I've toyed with the idea of pre-meshing them in 3DS MAX with turbosmoothing and all, and then exporting them out into SFM, placing them for the shot, and then using PP opacity masks to make it look right. If I do go through with this animation (which I've had in my mind ever since I finished the Disc Wars animation), then that's probably how I'll end up doing it.

The ribbons being on Refract doesn't play nice with the grid, as such they don't render at all angles. This results in a problem, that is so far an easy post-processing fix. A way around it is to render the shot with no ribbons at all, but everything else turned on, and then to render the shot with everything BUT the grid, and then overlay that shot over the original shot on "lighten". Works like a charm.