Why isn't the background on this material showing up as transparent?

So this is a question that I’m seeing pop up a lot, and yet none of the answers I’ve found are working for me.

I have this PNG image with an alpha channel:

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Which I imported into Unity, setting it to use input texture as alpha source, and setting alpha to transparent:

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The image looks like it is being rendered the way I want in the preview. However when I apply it to a material, using a transparent shader like so:

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The end result suddenly has a blue background, like so:

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There must be something simple I’m missing. Does anyone have any idea why this is happening? I just want the background to be transparent, the way it is showing up when I first import the image.

Thank you!

Does it work like intended if you change the shader to “Standard (specular setup)”, make the specular all black and set Smoothness to 0?

Change the Metallic Smoothness Source from “Albedo Alpha” to “Metallic Alpha”.

Right now it’s using the alpha channel in your texture to determine smoothness. For some reason, this seems to discount it from being used as a transparency channel.

As it turns out, the solution was to change the shader to “unlit / transparent”. Worked like a charm. Only problem is I also wanted to fade this object out using an alpha channel, but unlit / transparent won’t allow me to access one, since it doesn’t have a color setting. Oh well…

I think what you are looking for is the standard shader set to “Fade” instead of transparent. You could turn off specular highlights and reflections to have only your graphic displayed on the object. You can modify its alpha value to fade it in/out.

These setting seem to be working for me, at least for now :slight_smile: