parts semi-transparency

Tangled-Universe · August 25, 2011, 05:47:05 AM

Quote from: Dune on August 25, 2011, 04:49:43 AM
I thought to take a shot upwards, but this is what happens to the transparent disc. I tried all settings of the object (like 2-sided, flip normals, etc, even turned the object 180 degrees), but couldn't get it transparent again. Does anyone have an idea? Perhaps something I have to change in the disc object itself?

That's because of the design of the watershader. It won't allow you to render from beneath the surface. You'd need to rotate the disc 180 degrees on X or Z to get the transparency working again.

Dune · August 25, 2011, 08:06:34 AM

Rotating the disc doesn't help, I tried. I'll experiment some more....

N810 · August 25, 2011, 09:34:20 AM

well you could fix it in photoshop by making 2 renders,
on with just the rotor and another with a solid disk,
just paste the solid one over the regular one and
make it like 50% transparent or something like that.

Tangled-Universe · August 25, 2011, 10:29:59 AM

Quote from: Dune on August 25, 2011, 08:06:34 AM
Rotating the disc doesn't help, I tried. I'll experiment some more....

No of course not, I just realized. The idea conflicts with the principle/argument about why I think it doesn't work.

Simply put I don't think you can put a watershader in between your camera and sun or your camera below the water and rendering rays (raytracer rays, not sun rays) getting through the water, since the transparency is "fake". Can't really put in sensible words, sorry.

Dune · August 25, 2011, 10:43:18 AM

I understand very well. Perhaps it would work without raytracing, but I'm not gonna find out. It's not that important anyway. I made another version detail 0.55 and AA6 this time), but now there's a black artifact. It disappeared when moving the heli a notch up.

Tangled-Universe · August 25, 2011, 10:45:10 AM

Quote from: Dune on August 25, 2011, 10:43:18 AM
I understand very well. Perhaps it would work without raytracing, but I'm not gonna find out. It's not that important anyway. I made another version detail 0.55 and AA6 this time), but now there's a black artifact. It disappeared when moving the heli a notch up.

No it's not that type of raytracing which you mean now. Not about raytrace rendering the objects. Raytracing the scene-elements, the hardcoded shader itself.

j meyer · August 25, 2011, 10:57:08 AM

As for the disk:i remember having similar issues and in some cases a decay distance
of 1e+010 helped getting rid of the effect.

Dune · August 25, 2011, 12:22:02 PM

Thanks, Martin and J. Meyer. I'll check that out. Off to supper now.

dandelO · August 25, 2011, 01:45:12 PM

Ulco; This is an issue I discovered some time back and reported to the 'Glass' thread that Marc started, I think I took it into the support forum soon afterwards because it wasn't always this way. This problem was introduced in TG2.1, if I remember correctly.

I'll find those links, back in a bit...

dandelO · August 25, 2011, 01:53:15 PM

I moved the subject from Marc's thread; http://forums.planetside.co.uk/index.php?topic=9922.0

To its own thread in TG discussion, not support. Here's my link about this specific issue; http://forums.planetside.co.uk/index.php?topic=9943.0

There is a confirmation by Matt that it is indeed a newly introduced bug, as of 2.1. It still isn't fixed.
Any atmosphere that is visible through the transparency suffers from the problem, whether ray trace rendered or not.
Hopefully it will be fixed soon as we were once able to have a beautiful transparency shader to fit any scene before.
It should work correctly in your first pov, i.e. looking down on the rotors, but not upwards to the sky.

That's what your problem is here.

Dune · August 26, 2011, 02:39:30 AM

Hey, thanks, Martin. I missed that thread somehow. So it's just a waiting game now. The only thing I can think of now regarding the glass ball is to eliminate the back half by using a default shader's opacity input and a simple shape. But that's theoretical.

Just tested J. Meyer's solution and it works! Thanks very much.

Tangled-Universe · August 26, 2011, 04:30:24 AM

Quote from: dandelO on August 25, 2011, 01:53:15 PM
I moved the subject from Marc's thread; http://forums.planetside.co.uk/index.php?topic=9922.0

To its own thread in TG discussion, not support. Here's my link about this specific issue; http://forums.planetside.co.uk/index.php?topic=9943.0

There is a confirmation by Matt that it is indeed a newly introduced bug, as of 2.1. It still isn't fixed.
Any atmosphere that is visible through the transparency suffers from the problem, whether ray trace rendered or not.
Hopefully it will be fixed soon as we were once able to have a beautiful transparency shader to fit any scene before.
It should work correctly in your first pov, i.e. looking down on the rotors, but not upwards to the sky.

That's what your problem is here.

Yes, atmosphere visible through transparency...those were the words I'm looking for actually, thanks

J. Meyer's solution worked for me too a couple of weeks ago with a similar experiment, thanks for putting that up too