I have a issue where i need to make my transparent video alpha clip but I am using blender 4.4 and blend mode isn't a option like it used to be. How to I make my video alpha clip or at least make my edges clean on my plane
1 Answer
EEVEE got reworked a lot and there is no Alpha Clip option anymore. However you could help yourself with a workaround which actually works better if you need different clip settings on different objects.
First of all I will elaborate further how it was before, just to see what we are dealing with in the examples I show it in Cycles, the image texture is some colors over a transparent background (left) with an alpha mask (right) that has a quite smooth transition from white (fully opaque) to black (fully transparent). In the semi-transparent areas of the image you can see that the original background was white which is giving this highlighted outline:
Switching to EEVEE now in an older Blender version (3.6.9 here), you can set the Blend mode to Alpha Clip and set a Clip Threshold value (default is 0.5) which will set every greyscale value below this threshold to black and everything above to white, so a greyscale map will be converted to black and white. Now you can change this threshold until you like the result, here three examples 0.1, 0.5 and 0.8:
But now comes the problem with the old EEVEE clip options: the Clip Threshold can be set inside the material, i.e. you can set different thresholds for each material that you create. So why not make three objects with the same image but different thresholds and put them next to each other for comparison to see which value gives the desired result? Well, this is what happens - no matter which value is set in the material, EEVEE will always use the lowest value (of all visible objects) for all transparency. So as you can see below, even though I used three thresholds 0.1, 0.5 and 0.8 all transparency shows the lowest clipping of 0.1:
So if I would now hide the object with the threshold of 0.1, the remaining two use a threshold of 0.5, if I hide the object with 0.5 the last one will use its own threshold 0.8:
In my example I just used the same image and different values only to try which looks best - that is not a big problem. But when it comes to using different images at the same time in a scene and each of them must have a different threshold so they all look good?
Then you would have to use a workaround in old EEVEE and the same can be used in newer versions where the Alpha Clip no longer exists: clip the alpha inside the shader nodes.
Clipping the greyscale alpha mask to become a black and white mask is nothing else then checking if a pixel is above or below a certain value. You can simply achieve this by using a Math node set to Greater Than and changing the Threshold value there. This way each material is independent from any Alpha Clip or Clip Threshold setting respectively and you can have three different results in the same scene:
Of course the downside is you have to add a Math node to all materials where you need this alpha clipping. Maybe this harsh transition (either black or white) is not necessary anymore now that there are other possibilities.
For example, in Cycles there never was an Alpha Clip option - you would have to do it like described above with a Math node as well. But since Cycles can deal with smooth alpha transitions, instead of clipping you could just increase the contrast etc. of the greyscale mask with a Color Ramp to get some "smooth clipping".
This can of course be done in EEVEE as well instead of harsh clipping. I would only recommend to change the Settings > Render Method to Blended instead of the default Dithered for smoother results:





