A problem with transparent objects

[Rabenschwinge]

Hi, it´s me again.
I´m doing a lot of work on my age Afelahn at the moment, and stumbled upon a problem I can´t solve by myself.

I´m trying to make glass windows, glass cases and fish tanks, and there is always the same problem: I can´t get the material right. I tried it WITH texture, WITHOUT texture, both time it didn´t work. I used the Alpha value and set it to 0.001, and it still wasn´t transparent enough. It looks like milk glass instead of normal, transparent glass.

Then I tried to reduce any reflections, but then it looks way too dark, like the glass is black - and even then it isn´t transparent enough.

It is driving me nuts, what is it that I do wrong?


Oops, forgot to mention: I´m developing with Blender and PyPRP 1.x, for Offline-URU.

[dendwaler]

First i have to tell you that i have never tried it myself , so i cannot talk from my own experience.

But if i had to do it , i would try it to do as described here in the blender wiki.
http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/Doc:Tutorials/Materials/Clear_Glass

I know, that some of what is explained there is simply not possible.
Because its better not to use shadow buffers, and the necessary specularity is not supported in PyPRP.
PyPRP unfortunately is very basic which limits our possibilities for good texturing enormously.

What you can try is texture it as described in the tutorial and when you are finished, bake the texture for the object and save this as a png. Be absolute sure to make a perfect UV map No overlapping from faces of the object is allowed in the UV .
So front and back side have to be seperated.
Reload this for the object "custom made texture "and set PNG for the transparency as you would do for Ao and shadow baking.
I hope (and expect) this to work.

[Rabenschwinge]

I will try this, thanks - although I´ve never ever baked any textures yet - I hope, I will understand how to do it ^^


EDIT:
I did it - I don´t know how I did it, but it worked ^^
Thanks again

[Karkadann]

I had a similar problem with with jpg gif and a bunch of others the only one I can get to look transparent is a tiff file

[bnewton81]

If I were going to do a fish tank, I would just bake the textures on as if I were doing a skybox. First create the scene you want to use inside the fish tank then put a box around it and bake. Sorta like hambgerhelper only completely different. This will also have the wonderful side effect of less strain on your gpu/processor in uru.

[Lontahv]

The specularity settings should work as expected when exported and viewed in game. Unfortunately Plasma does not have ray-traced lighting effects like Blender render, so glass that looks exactly like the glass in the tutorial is not possible. I would recommend using a transparent grimy texture and an ENV layer along with high specularity on glass surfaces for use in Plasma.

Also, try to set the level of transparency you want in the glass texture (using Photoshop or Gimp) rather than relying on Blender's sliders for that (I've had better luck editing textures that messing around with Blender settings).

[Rabenschwinge]

If I were going to do a fish tank, I would just bake the textures on as if I were doing a skybox. First create the scene you want to use inside the fish tank then put a box around it and bake. Sorta like hambgerhelper only completely different. This will also have the wonderful side effect of less strain on your gpu/processor in uru.

Do you mean baking the texture with all the fish, water plants and stuff? So that everything is 2D in the texture?

I`m not sure what hambgerhelper is - the only thing I found when googling was this- I´m not american, so it might be a cultural reference I don´t get ^^

The specularity settings should work as expected when exported and viewed in game. Unfortunately Plasma does not have ray-traced lighting effects like Blender render, so glass that looks exactly like the glass in the tutorial is not possible. I would recommend using a transparent grimy texture and an ENV layer along with high specularity on glass surfaces for use in Plasma.

Also, try to set the level of transparency you want in the glass texture (using Photoshop or Gimp) rather than relying on Blender's sliders for that (I've had better luck editing textures that messing around with Blender settings).

Okay, that´s just what I tried, a grimy texture, with the transparency done in Photoshop. The problem I had, was, that I already made the texture very transparent with Photoshop, but in URU, it still wasn´t transparent enough, no matter how transparent I made it. I used a .png file for this - would a .tif work better?

ENV layer - is that the thing Andylegate described in this tutorial?

Thanks for your answers, I´m still learning

[dendwaler]

Ok, in photoshop , did you do the next?

1) duplicate the layers that formed the texture and merge to visible so it is only one layer( this is just to be sure, so only if needed)
2) Right click on the new layer, choose blending options.
3) choose blending option "normal"( default)
4) change the opacity slider to 50 %
5) save this new layer as png.

When it is still not enough transparent then bring the slider even lower.
I do not expect that, i think 80% is about right, though even a bit higher.

[tachzusamm]

I used a .png file for this - would a .tif work better?

No. An image is converted to a DDS format for Plasma on export, no matter what format (TIF or PNG) you used as source. JPG of course does not work, because JPEGs do not contain an alpha channel.

If you like, you could post (or PM me) the image you used, I will have a look at it to see what's wrong.

[Jojon]

As a little aside; It may be worth noting that, as far as I can tell, PyPRP will always use the alpha channel of a PNG file, whether you want it to or not. Unticking the "UseAlpha" button does nothing.

This is one of those little automagic things, which are helpful and work-saving, but confuses the heek out of somebody like me. :)


Anyway; you can tick the little "hourglass" button, in the Blender image/UV-editor, to view the picture with alpha.