There's something wrong with transparency

Hi Bogdan,

I suppose a shadow covers the object/area which has the transparent material applied to it? If this is the case, half-transparent objects will currently look more see-through than you'd expect. We're actively working on improving this behavior though!

Further, may I ask what you want to achieve in your project through transparent materials? There might be a better solution as opposed to setting your material opacity to ~95%.

Hi Bogdan,

it's an old, annoying limitation of Enscape - no semi transparency of diffuse materials. So, milky glass or air balloon materials or silk curtains are not possible. Over 4% transparency cause the diffuse part of the material is complete turned off. You only get something like a colored transparency (like tinted glass). For me it's a problem to work around this limit and I hope it will be solved. Maybe it's a question of the count of user requests.

For still images you could render your image twice and mix the diffuse effect in postwork.

Here a some test images that show the effect:

Some strange glass effects

I have found a better/quicker way to get the diffused effect is to apply a bump map to the texture (a generic noise, quite dense.)

Quote from Bogdan

Ok, at least I know It's a bug and I'll stop to try to tweak it.

Hope it will get fixed soon.

So far I know it not classified as bug. It's how Enscape works yet and improvements will come. I'm not sure it means a continuous transparency from 0..100%.

Gadget I'm curious - could you post an example?

I was (am) designing a display for various obscure glasses in our showroom:

But it works just as well for fabric (as long as you don;t want it coloured)...

(Normal glass, dense bump-map, less dense bump-map)

Quote from Gadget

I was (am) designing a display for various obscure glasses in our showroom:

But it works just as well for fabric (as long as you don;t want it coloured)...

(Normal glass, dense bump-map, less dense bump-map)

Display More

Hi gadget! I just found out this interesting topi: could you share the technique to create such wonderful frosted glass effect you show in your first image?

<Shrug> it's as simple as applying a pattern bump to a glass surface.

So the SketchUp mat is plain grey and you put a bump map in the bump map slot?

Yup:

The more 'white' in the shade, then the more "particles" in/on the material that reflect the light and you get a milky, obscure quality to the glass (and the more Opacity you have to use to see through it). The more 'black' in the shade, then the more the light passes through and the surface becomes more transparent and you don't have to use as much Opacity to get the same look.

(I prefer not to use 0% opacity so that I can actually see the surface in SU)

You might also have to go into the bump tab and tic on Explicit texture transformation to change the size of the texture used.

WONDERFUL! I did a fast test and it works like a charm! thank you very much!