"mask" reveal

[soupman99]

I'm trying to "mask" reveal an object.  It was suggested that I create a ramp and plug it onto the transparency of the layer.
That works fine, but I'm using a Blinn and so my highlights still show up and you can see the object as if it were a glass of milk with no milk inside.

I tried plugging the ramp into the eccentricity attribute, but then my highlights are totally blown out, since my ramp values are either totally black, or totally white.  Creating another greyscale ramp to control this particular attribute seems very messy.

I tried using boolean objects, but when I use it on an illustrator object it start to do all kinds of funky stuff when I animate the "masker" object.

It seems like there should be a fairly simple solution since every animation software has about 2 clicks worth of steps to achieve what I've described.

Am I missing something that would work?

[joojaa]

I'm trying to "mask" reveal an object.  It was suggested that I create a ramp and plug it onto the
It seems like there should be a fairly simple solution since every animation software has about 2 clicks worth of steps to achieve what I've described.

Am I missing something that would work?

Yes, but normal 2d planes consist of 4 channels a shasder on the otherhand has far more channels its as if you had a 3 layer photoshop image.

so a bilinn shader is:

incandescence + diffuse + specular. You are only affecting diffuse thus your specular is left unhecked for. You can do this i 4 ways.

1 connect the ramp to inverse then that to multiply divide and connect that to  your specular color. And set the node to multiply and connect whatever was in specular color to the multiplys second slot.

2 slightly easier connect the blinn shader to the ramps input color, ad connect whertever you reveal to a seocnd index and connect the output to a surface shader

3 or use a blend node.

4 use a layered shader

Creating another greyscale ramp to control this particular attribute seems very messy.

Use the invert node.