Transparency Maps Revisited

I have continued testing using animated gradient transparency maps to create the bursting bubble effect. One thing I have attempted is to layer the transparency of the bubble's shader witht the transparency of the gradient. I tried this by using Maya's "Mult Double" node. I created three of these nodes, connected the out colour of the gradient into their inputs & connected their outputs to the colour of the shader as illustrated below.

 This however didn't give the desired results as shown below.

 As you can see, the part of the bubble which has burst is not fully transparent.

Another test I did was to see if I could solve the problem of the specular highlight showing up in the transparent areas. I tested this on the Mental Ray shader "mia_material_x". This proved to be more successful.

 I acheived this by simply using the "Reverse" node in Maya to invert the colours of the gradient so that it would only show the specular highlight on the side of the bubble which is still visible.

SOUP Dev - Cage Node

I have recently discovered a set of nodes to extend the functionality of Maya called SOUP Dev from soup-dev.com. One of these nodes which I have become interested in trying out is the Cage node. This node takes two pieces of geometry, one which acts as the clipping boundary and the other which gets clipped. Which ever part of the geometry falls outside of the boundary gets its polygon faces deleted.

I thought this node may come in useful for creating the effect of bubbles bursting, which I intend to test further. But for now, here are some of the examples which the SOUP Dev provide.