Can't add black to material using lerp. Ends up transparent. What's the alternative?

Trying to add a shadow to my masked out moon using the same mask but with an offset. Instead of creating a shadow it makes it half transparent. Now I have floating bananas.

I don’t get it, the lerp node asks for an alpha. I just want it to use the alpha to blend, I don’t want it to ask for a second opinion from the texture sample.

Any solution?

Changing the shadow colour from black to red yields this result:

Resolved, fixed working moon.

Ignore the yellow, the sun’s not a problem.

Can we see your material?

If I look closely your moon has the sun color, and the moon color looks to be used as opacity.

It does, but I don’t see where your nodes go to. Also what is the material? opaque? It looks like it’s masked or so.

The moon is slightly off coloured from the sun, indeed. I just don’t think linear Interpolate recognises black as a valid colour to add. Does it?

It’s opaque. It’s a standard sky sphere with the exception of the nodes in the screenshots. The material was an unlit material, meaning only an emissive node. I thought to myself, black doesn’t emit, maybe that’s the problem, so I changed to default lit and there’s literally no difference in blending. It’s got to be something to do with the lerp’s, if I change the colour from black to bright red, it works. Problem is, I don’t want a bright red shadow lol.

Can you show where everything is plugged in?
It’s hard to debug without seeing the complete picture

Hope all goes well man, good luck!

Linear Interpolation doesn’t add black colour from B to A based on alpha, it removes colour from A based on alpha. I was removing colour from the moon only and as a result it looked transparent where the shadow was. I needed to remove colour from the stars as well but not the clouds.

It is a pain in the ■■■, there’s no denying that, I wish I could just say add black to A based on alpha but no. There must be another way.

I any case, sorting the layering out so I was using lerp to remove colour from the moon and stars yielded success. Working with sphere masks for the moon is a nightmare but I ended up getting these results Imgur: The magic of the Internet

It’s ok, well no It’s pretty bad to be honest, it’s so bland it doesn’t fit with the world, lacking texture.

I think I’m going to try a static mesh instead, offset far away from a centre pivot and just rotate that when I’m rotating the moonlight. Not sure how to go about the Earth shadows on it yet.