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how do you get it transparent?


carpalmer

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I am trying to globally control transparency of furniture, image props, etc, so that I may tweak them in my rendered model. I've tried working classes and layers, but haven't been able to adjust opacity at all...

The idea is to have building read "full strength" and then have a few different layers or classes where I can have image props, furniture symbols, etc.

What am I missing?

thx

carpalmer

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  • 2 weeks later...

Is the furniture you are trying to set transparent grouped objects. If so I have found that you must go in an set the attributes of each object within the group to either an individual setting or by class.

Another thing might be that your furniture pieces were placed as symbols which would also not take any formatting globally as the original symbol holds the format.

Pete A

Edited by panthony
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  • 2 weeks later...

I think the stumbling block here is that carpalmer is trying to adjust the transparency of the furniture objects using the opacity slider in the attributes palette or class attributes dialog. That opacity control relates only to the object's appearance in 2D. This will have no effect in 3D.

The two choices you have both have pros and cons. The first, is to put all of your desired translucent elements into their own layer. You can then set that layer visibility to greyed and while viewing your model using stacked layers, and assuming the active layer is not the furniture layer, the furniture will appear grey and 50% opaque. This will also work in a viewport will all visible layers rendering normally and the furniture layer rendering grey and translucent. The disadvantage is you have no additional opacity control, and the colors are lost.

The other method is to adjust the textures that are applied to the furniture. This might sound like a lot of work (and is does require RenderWorks), but if you can live with solid colors as your primary texture, you can apply the transparency shader to a single RenderWorks texture, that is set to use the objects attribute color, and the result will be red, blue, green, etc. objects all that have a user definable level of transparency. To make it even easier, you can do this at the class level.

Obviously these are two very intricate workarounds. Being able to utilize the newly added object opacity feature in 2008 for 3D objects would be brilliant. Even in 2D only, that new feature is huge.

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You can set the opacity for any texture in VW2008, not just solid colors.

Yes this is true. And I should have been more clear about why using solid colors might be more convenient. if you are using any texture, for example, let's say you aply a leather texture to a sofa, wood textures to furniture legs, and fabric textures to other items, in order to make them all transparent, you'd have to add transparency shaders to all of them. Then of course to make them opaque again, you'll have to repeat this process.

The benefit of using solid colors, is that the sofa can be dark brown, the furniture legs can be lighter brown, and the fabric items can be of any other color, and all of them are using the same one texture. So to make all of these items transparent, all you would have to do is edit the one texture. Reversing this is as easy as editing the one texture again. Of course to sacrifice the look of the surface materials as being solid color only might be too great a penalty in the name of convenience. You might have to resort to editing the transparency of all of your furniture textures.

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Love the idea... How about transparent leather in a Chesterfield?

The benefit of using solid colors, is that the sofa can be dark brown, the furniture legs can be lighter brown, and the fabric items can be of any other color, and all of them are using the same one texture.

Indeed. And now with 24-bit colour everywhere, one should be able get quite reasonable results.

I'm anything but a rendering expert, but I'd think that with a set of textures using Object Color and

- 2 or 3 levels of reflectivity

- 2 or 3 levels of transparency

- 2 or 3 types of bump

in various combinations, one could get reasonable results of practically anything.

Just an untested theory, though.

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