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Re: Help!! How can I use textures as stained glass?
Thanks for your help. I guess I do know how to make transparent semi-transparent stuff in blender, the problem is that once it is rendered in SH3D, it is no longer semi-transparent.
This is an experiment I did: left blind: solid, 2nd: alpha 1.0, 3rd: alpha 0.75, 4th: alpha 0.5, 5th: alpha 0.25
Netherlands
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Re: Help!! How can I use textures as stained glass?
I converted a model from the Sketchup Warehouse in such a way that the vertical blinds now have two sides. You can apply a different texture to each side, including (partially) transparent textures.
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Re: Help!! How can I use textures as stained glass?
okh, thank you for your attention. I have tried both. I did some tests today with the glass textures of your stained glass windows, with unsatisfying result.
I start to wonder wether I'm having a renderer issue (driver?). I'm on a iMac 2011 with ATI Radeon 6970M. This is the result when I tried the model from hansmex (left: normal, right: mirrored, both stretched by 50% in length): http://www.imagebam.com/image/3ecc9a311334028
The goal btw is to have the vertical blinds glow when the sun shines into them, but maybe this is simply not possible.
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Re: Help!! How can I use textures as stained glass?
Oh well, transparency is tricky... And your ambition level is fairly high
You may be right that your graphics driver/card is playing tricks on you. I seem to remember that Puybaret suggested something to that effect when a model of mine behaved strangely. If you post the unsuccessful file, maybe someone else is willing to try it on different configurations.
Frosted glass, however, should be possible. If you look at the stained glass at the origin of this thread (linked above), it behaves reasonably well in different rendering and light situations.
Please post if you (or someone else) succeed - and I shall keep your issue in mind when I next need something transparent. Good luck.
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Re: Help!! How can I use textures as stained glass?
@condo
Well, the rendering isn't too bad: I applied a 100% transparent texture to one side, and a "bl&w" tiled texture to the other side, where the black (or white?) squares are 100% transparent. That explains the "strange" look of the blinds in the image: it's pretty much the same as it looked on my computer.
The reason I made the model, is that you had a "vehicle" with which to experiment, not to provide a turn-key solution, because I didn't know what kind of result you were after.
Also, there is a problem with SH3D's rendering. Light doesn't bounce like it does in real life. This improves rendering times, but reduces the real-life appearance in some cases. A few months ago, someone provided some images with adapted (improved ?) rendering, using different settings for the rendering engine in the form of a small file. I can't find the original post/thread, but I uploaded the scripts. The links are below. Hopefully these are of help. Put them in the directory where SH3D is, and double-click them to start SH3D with the settings of the file.
Even if they don't solve your problem(s), they serve to show that the rendering engine is quite flexible and accepts all kinds of different parameters. However, beware of rendering times. See this link for some examples of what is possible with the Sunflow rendering engine that SG3D uses.
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Re: Help!! How can I use textures as stained glass?
I forgot to thank you as well, hansmex, for all your efforts which was unintentional. I will try those settings tomorrow.
The problem as I see it is that in the 3D preview, it looks all fine but in the rendered image, it looks plain wrong. I'm totally aware of the fact that secondary lighting (glowing of objects after receiving light from a primary light source) is not available, I was just hoping to make the vertical blinds glow as a visual effect, not as a source of light.
I have conducted some further testing, the results look more or less all the same no matter what mtl or alpha png translucency setting I'm using. It's not the end of the world, I have achieved a lot more then I could have ever imagined.
Once I find suitable webspace, I will upload the testroom that I have created today.
Netherlands
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Re: Help!! How can I use textures as stained glass?
Forget trying the files I shared, because they won't provide the reflections on the shades you are looking for. A better guess would be the Sunglow website I referred to, and make a study of what is possible...........
Have you checked out the examples of the SH3D photo render contest? That's about as good as it gets using SH3D. Quite impressive in my opinion.
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Re: Help!! How can I use textures as stained glass?
New to the 3d rendering world and I too was wondering if my graphics driver/card may not be adequate. I am trying to make an object (lamp shade on a pendant light) to be semi transparent, but all I get when rendering is full transparency.
I have tried creating a photoshop PNG file (white square set at 90% opacity), and it still comes out as full transparency.
I even set the object to a solid color and tweaked the MTL file so that the materials "d" setting was 0.9 (thinking 0 was full transparent and 1 is opaque), but that too comes out as full transparent.
It seems to me that I can either have full opaque or full transparent. That's why I am wondering if my machine just can't handle. Is this a correct/good assumption?
France
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Re: Help!! How can I use textures as stained glass?
For your information, I improved the rendering of transparent texture in version 4.4. Hope this will work better now...
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Emmanuel Puybaret, Sweet Home 3D developer
