Stealth material animating the Mix of a Blend Map

Note – Mental Ray is used without any Final Gather or GI ... it will anti-alias the near-white diffuse edges against the star background better than the standard.

Use a single direct light with raytrace shadows at 100% density for a strong space lighting. Use near/far attenuation if necessary.

Out stealth teapot has a Mix Map that goes from a Falloff diffuse map to a Falloff opacity map.
The maps are masked by the same Falloff map.

As you can see by the red tags we are going to animate the mix amount between the 2 materials.



Material #1 has some specularity, and then in the diffuse slot, this red-white falloff map. It makes for the nice distribution of white light on the edge of the teapot.



Down to the diffuse map ...

all the falloffs are Fresnel with the same curve

Material #2 has only opacity, nothing else. The front of map 2 is black not red, as there is no need to have a color in an opacity map.

the mask over each map is the same basic Fresnel Falloff

animate the mix amount

frame 0 is 0%

Between keyframes – frame 15

frame 30 100%

fade out the stealth teapot frame 30-60

Intermediate frame 45

frame 60