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Elevations: how to fade out background buildings?


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What technique do you use to fade out background buildings? I have my lighting just right for my proposed buildings but I need to knock back the surrounding background buildings because they're too dark and distracting from the proposed buildings.

They're currently simple white fill but maybe I need to use a texture with reflectivity? Or transparency? I dunno. I've tried a few things but not having much success.

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Yeah, I know that song! You could try using the polygon in paint bucket or outline mode... But if it's complicated then it will take time.

One other idea... Use a layer (or two) and/or classes for the existing bldg.'s. That might give you enough control if you use multiple (stacked) VP's.. You could have a background VP, all grayed out, with all the existing, then a second VP in front with all the new stuff. The second VP would cover the first so that might cut down on the tediousness of it...

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Correct me if I'm wrong, but even with a spray can, you would still need to mask the un-greyed area(s), right? And once you've done that, you've already drawing the needed poly's for my first suggestion... So... It's work. The sad fact is that sometimes computers are NOT faster than "by hand"... Fortunately the majority of tasks is actually faster...

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How about duplicating the VP and superimposing them, the one on top can have a depth range that only shows your building with the correct render settings, the VP below has a depth range showing all surrounding buildings as well. This way you can set each viewport exactly as you like i.e.. the background can have opacity, be black and white, have different line weights, colors etc. Also no need for tedious cropping (unless the foreground VP shows surrounding buildings as well then you will need to crop this obviously).

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All of this is great, but one can't help but wonder exactly what's going on behind the scenes on a sheet layer. If it's all vector based at this point, shouldn't one be able to work with the layout as if in Illustrator?

I think that VW would get a lot of kudus if they had a set of tools available to pretty up sheet layers. Off the top of my head:

A brush/tool that could increase/decrease line weight of any line you moused over

A brush/tool that could increase/decrease opacity of any line you moused over

A brush/tool that could increase/decrease saturation of color of any line one moused over

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