image on a transparent plane

[lftantillo]

How do I create a shader that will simulate the effect of an image on a transparent plane? An example would be a series of dots and lines created in Photoshop placed on an polygon plane that could then be positioned in a scene in which only the artwork is visible and able to cast shadows and reflect on surfaces.

[DjVoyager]

Couple of things you'd need to do to achieve transparency shadows.

1. Turn on "Raytracing" in the Render Globals.
2. Turn on "Raytracing Shadows" of the light you're using.
3. Open the object material's attribute, and under "Raytracing Options", lower the "Shadow Attenuation" to 0.

Hope that helps.

[lftantillo]

After trying several alternatives I have found that what I'm trying to acheive has to do with blending in the layered textures attributes. I can experiment with many different combinations of transparencey and color blending as you do in Photoshop like "add", " subtract", "multiply" etc. I can see the results imediately in my viewport but when I render using raytrace the effects (particularly transparency) are gone.